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COPYRIGHT DEPOSITS 



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LONDON : PRINTED BY 
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
AND PARLIAMENT STREET 



TEN YEARS 

ON A 

GEORGIA PLANTATION 



SINCE THE WAR 



FRANCES BUTLER LEIGH 




LONDON 

RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET 
publishers in ©rbhtarn to %n Utajfsti) tbe (flncen 

1883 



All rights reserved 



' Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon 
these slain, that they may live ' — Ezekiel xxxv, 9 

' O wheresoever these may be 
Betwixt the slumber of the poles 
To-day they count as kindred souls ' — In Mcmoriam 



i 



BROTHERS AGAIN: 



SUGGESTED BY DECORATION DAY, 1877. 



I. 

Great Land ! of all thy children 'tis the part 
To give themselves to thee, to shelter thee, 
To live for thee, and love with their whole heart, 
Or die for thy fair fame, if needs must be : 
And of thy children, both from South and North, 
Some went to battle called in thousands forth 
By thy dear voice, and conquered, though they 
died ; 

And some, who heard indeed that solemn call, 
l-ut-weftgty-4*eard, fell on a vanquished side, 
Yet well contented for that side to fall ; 
Brothers with brothers fought, and in that fight 
Let all rejoice who fell, still thinking they were 
right. 

a 



vi 



Brothers Again, 



II. 

I wandered slowly through a far off-town, 
Where the white winter comes not, nor the storm 
Lashes with icy scourge fair flowers down 
To early graves ; where balmy winds disarm 
The wrathful tempests rage ; and as I went, 
Sudden I came upon a monument. 
Inscribed was this : To the Confederate Dead : 
And underneath, the period of the strife,— 
Those four dire years that dashed away the life, 
The life of priceless thousands, and o'erspread 
Our land with mourning ; — on the other side 
Only these words : ' Come from the four winds, O 
Breath, 

And breathe upon these slain that they may live : ' 
No bitterness, no anger, naught beside 
A sigh of silence, unexpressed, that saith 
Of sorrow more than tears could weep, loud grief 
could give. 

III. 

Then the whole story of the war, methought, 
Passed in its dreary length from first to last, — £ 
By those great words into my memory brought, 
Summoned from out the pages of the past. 
An April dawn, near ninety years before, 
Had seen a horseman in the shadowy night 



Brothers Again. 



Flit through New England's towns announcing war, 
Calling the stout old patriots out to fight : — 
An April dawn saw that first crashing shell 
Rush through the startled air, and thundering 
burst 

On Sumter's head ; and as it shattering fell, 
The herald sound shrieked discord. This the last 
Alarm of strife, and then in dark array 
Battle on battle followed, fray on fray : 
Name after name, in stern succession falling, 
Bears with it countless tales of blood and woe ; 
What countless others, mournful, sad, appalling, 
Must silent rest, with voices silent too ! 
What multitudes of heroes now are resting 
Unknown beneath the sod where first they fell ! 
And slander's tongue their name has ceased molest- 
ing,— 

Has let them lie untroubled where they fell ; 
While through the country each name with it bears 
A memory of triumph or of tears. 
Sadly to hearts bereaved they now must sound, 
Beginning with themselves a life-long grief, 
Recalling as each separate year comes round 
Some sorrow borne alone beyond relief. 
See quiet Williamsburg, where swaying shade 
O'erspreads the tree-girt college ; fire and blood 
In all their ghastly shapes her halls invade, 
While flames resistless scar the scorching wood. 
High soars the blaze, nor deigns on earth to tread, 



viii Brothers Again. 

But flies remorseless o'er the silent dead. 
Above that fitful glare the leaden sky 
Grows lurid at the sight of agony, 
Till darker ever as the cloud descends 
Heaven pours the flood, and night the horror ends. 
Then followed seasons when the deadly heat 
Fell in its fury on the parching earth, 
And on the springing crops resistless beat, 
Bearing a time of drought, a time of dearth : 
Then gloomy Autumn, dismal with its rains, 
A weary time, when our fair nation's brow 
Was racked with sorrow, while on marshy plains 
Still poured her life-blood, still increased her woe ; 
Huge swamps extended o'er the tedious track, 
And rivers rose, and pestilence was shed 
On saddened ranks, and as report came back 
Of some new fight, of some new hero dead, 
Our land was forced to weep upon the graves 
Of sons unnatural, of erring braves. 
Still the grim trump of war, whose thrilling blast 
Shaketh the battlements of peace, whose shock 
Has made our country reel, its summons cast 
Forth to the skies, and to the battle smoke 
Marshalled both young and old, and wider through 
Both North and South the desolation grew. 
Up to the Northern gates the contest surges, 
And three long days at Gettysburg runs high : 
Out went both young and old ; the funeral dirges 
Blend with the glorious chant of victory. 



Brothers Again. 



ix 



Three fearful days beneath the burning sun ! 
What hopes soared up, and fell, ere they were done ! 
And when the twilight bless'd came gently creep- 
ing, 

For the third time over that bloody scene, 
Where their last slumber gallant forms were sleep- 
ing 

On hills that once, alas ! were fair and green — 
When in that night of stillness, sad, serene, 
Fond mothers sought their voiceless sons with 
weeping, 

And sounds of nature sang a solemn song 
Through the deep woods, and rushing brooks 
along — 

Then was the land in the abysm of war, 
Yet still, how long a time ere it was o'er ! 

IV. 

Here the grim picture on my sight 
Crowded too swift to see each fight, 
But in the darkness of the night, 

The Wilderness I saw ; 
And fighting forms and charging lines — 
Or in the dusk the beacon signs 
As through the wood the watch-fire shines, 

And skulking foes withdraw : — 
Swift and more swift the pageant moves, 
Now climbing hills, and now in groves, 



X 



Brothers Again. 



Now on some blasted heath, 
While- still the lurid smoke and glare 
Cover the sky and choke the air, 

Leaving their work beneath ; 
For all along that weary way 
The dead and dying scattered lay. 
And so proceeding to the close, 

They fight, and fall, and die, 
Until no more the watch-fire glows, 

Nor swells the battle cry : 
'Tis done ; — the dead are now at rest 
Upon their country's rugged breast. 

V. 

The wild bird builds her nest in branches tall, 
Amid the sheltering foliage of the tree 
Whose life was shattered by the deadly ball 
That crashed its green boughs once so ruthlessly : 
The wild bird sings his carol o'er the graves 
Of many fallen heroes where the grass 
Has grown, or where the ceaseless murmuring 
waves 

The site of some past conflict scarce can trace : 

If Nature thus, with all her healing arts, 

Hath striven to smooth the furrows from the breast 

Of our dear land, should we not do our best 

To smooth all furrows from our wounded hearts ? 

Then let us pray that as the sun and showers 



Brothers Again. 



XI 



Have charmed with their soft spell the dreary 
scenes. 

Till scarce they know themselves through all the 
flowers 

Strewn in their brakes and on their sloping greens, 
So we may let the showers of Lethe flow 
Upon the memory of that time of woe. 



Shade- wrapped Savannah ! By thy monument 
A lesson hath been taught to great and small, 
O may thy prayers be heard, its answer sent, 
Granted by Heaven's grace unto us all ! 
And when th' Eternal breath shall come at last, 
Breathing upon the land and summoning 
From all the battle-field an army vast, 
And by its power from every region bring 
Both young and old, from every sepulchre 
On mountain side, by stream and forest brake, 
And shall along the moaning ocean stir, 
Causing our dead from their long sleep to wake — 
The soldiers shall arise, mingled in death, 
And come together to the throne all bright, 
Each to be judged according to his light, 
Made perfect by that Great All-healing Breath ; 
No strife, no rancour, nothing bitter then, 
But they shall join their hands Brothers again/V^ 



VI. 




TEN YEARS 

ON 

A GEORGIA PLANTATION. 



CHAPTER I. 

CHAOS. 

The year after the war between the North 
and the South, I went to the South with my 
father to look after our property in Georgia 
and see what could be done with it. 

The whole country had of course under- 
gone a complete revolution. The changes 
that a four years' war must bring about in any 
country would alone have been enough to 
give a different aspect to everything ; but at 
the South, besides the changes brought about 
by the war, our slaves had been freed ; the 
Jy B 



2 



A Georgia Plantation. 



white population was conquered, ruined, and 
disheartened, unable for the moment to see 
anything but ruin before as well as behind, 
too wedded to the fancied prosperity of the 
old system to believe in any possible success 
under the new. And even had the people 
desired to begin at once to rebuild their 
fortunes, it would have been in most cases 
impossible, for in many families the young 
men had perished in the war, and the old 
men, if not too old for the labour and effort 
it required to set the machinery of peace 
going again, were beggared, and had not even 
money enough to buy food for themselves 
and their families, let alone their negroes, to 
whom they now had to pay wages as well as 
feed them. 

Besides this, the South was still treated 
as a conquered country. The white people 
were disfranchised, the local government in 
the hands of either military men or Northern 
adventurers, the latter of whom, with no 
desire to promote either the good of the 



Chaos. 3 

country or people, but only to advance their 
own private ends, encouraged the negroes in 
all their foolish and extravagant ideas of 
freedom, set them against their old masters, 
filled their minds with false hopes, and 
pandered to their worst passions, in order to 
secure for themselves some political office 
which they hoped to obtain through the negro 
vote. 

Into this state of things we came from 
the North, and I was often asked at the time, 
and have been since, to write some account 
of my own personal experience of the con- 
dition of the South immediately after the 
war, and during the following five years. But 
I never felt inclined to do so until now, when, 
in reading over a quantity of old letters 
written at the time, I find so much in them 
that is interesting, illustrative of the times 
and people, that I have determined to copy 
some of my accounts and descriptions, which 
may interest some persons now, and my 
children hereafter. Soon everything will be 

b 2 



4 A Georgia Plantation. 

so changed, and the old traits of the negro 
slave have so entirely vanished, as to make 
stories about them sound like tales of a lost 
race ; and also because even now, so little is 
really known of the state of things politically 
at the South. 

The accounts which have been written 
from time to time have been written either 
by travellers, who with every desire to get at 
the truth, could but see things superficially, 
or by persons whose feelings were too strong 
either on one side or the other to be perfectly 
just in their representations. I copy my 
impressions of things as they struck me then, 
although in many cases later events proved 
how false these impressions were, and how 
often mistaken I was in the opinions I 
formed. Indeed, we very often found our- 
selves taking entirely opposite views of things 
from day to day, which will explain apparent 
inconsistencies and contradictions in my 
statements ; but the new and unsettled con- 
dition of everything could not fail to produce 



Chaos, 5 

this result, as well as the excited state we 
were all in. 

I mention many rumours that reached 
us, which at the time we believed to be 
true, and which sometimes turned out to be 
so, but as often, not, as well as the things 
I know to be facts from my own personal 
experience, for rumours and exaggerations 
of all kinds made in a great measure the 

interest and excitement of our lives, although 

<_> 

the reality was strange and painful enough. 

On March 22, 1866, my father and my- 
self left the North. The Southern railroads 
were many of them destroyed for miles, not 
having been rebuilt since the war, and it 
was very questionable how we were to get 
as far as Savannah, a matter we did accom- 
plish however, in a week's time, after the 
following adventures, of which I find an 
account in my letters written at the time. 
We stopped one day in Washington, and 
werft all over the new Capitol, which had 
been finished since I was there five years ago. 



6 



A Georgia Plantation. 



On Saturday we left, reaching Richmond at 
four o'clock on Sunday morning. I notice 
that it is a peculiarity of Southern railroads 
that they always either arrive, or start, at four 
o'clock in the morning. That day we spent 
quietly there, and sad enough it was, for 
besides all the associations with the place 
which crowded thick and fast upon one's 
memory, half the town was a heap of burnt 
ruins, showing how heavily the desolation of 
war had fallen upon it. And in the afternoon 
I went out to the cemetery, and after some 
search found the grave I was looking for. 
There he lay, with hundreds of others who 
had sacrificed their lives in vain, their resting 
place marked merely by small wooden head- 
boards, bearing their names, regiments, and 
the battles in which they fell. The grief 
and excitement made me quite ill, so that I 
was glad to leave the town before daylight 
the next morning, and I hope I may never 
be there again. 

W e travelled all that day in the train, 



Chaos. 



7 



reaching Greensborough that night at eight 
o'clock. Not having been able to get any 
information about our route further on, we 
thought it best to stop where we were until 
we did find out. This difficulty was one 
that met us at every fresh stopping place 
along the whole journey ; no one could tell 
us whether the road ahead were open or not, 
and, if open, whether there were any means of 
getting over it. So we crawled on, dreading 
at each fresh stage to find ourselves stranded 
in the middle of the pine woods, with no 
means of progressing further. 

That night in Greensborough is one 
never to be forgotten. The hotel was a miser- 
able tumble-down old frame house, and the 
room we were shown into more fit for a 
stable than a human habitation ; a dirty bare 
floor, the panes more than half broken out of 
the windows, with two ragged, dirty calico 
curtains over them that waved and blew 
about in the wind. The furniture consisted 
of a bed, the clothes of which looked as if 



8 



A Georgia Plantation. 



they had not been changed since the war, 
but had been slept in, in the meanwhile, 
constantly, two rickety old chairs, and a table 
with three legs. The bed being entirely out 
of the question, and I very tired, I took my 
bundle of shawls, put them under my head 
against the wall, tilted my chair back, and 
prepared to go to sleep if I could. I was 
just dozing off when I heard my maid, whom 
I had kept in the room for protection, give a 
start and exclamation which roused me. I 
asked her what was the matter, to which she 
replied, a huge rat had just run across the 
floor. This woke me quite up, and we spent 
the rest of the night shivering and shaking 
with the cold, and knocking on the floor with 
our umbrellas to frighten away the rats, which 
from time to time came out to look at us. 

At four in the morning my father came 
for us, and we started for the train, driving 
two miles in an old army ambulance. From 
that time until eight in the evening we did 
not leave the cars, and then only left them to 



Chaos. 



9 



get into an old broken-down stage coach, 
which was originally intended to hold six 
people, but into which on this occasion they 
put nine, and, thus cramped and crowded, we 
drove for five hours over as rough a road as 
can well be imagined, reaching Columbia at 
three o'clock a.m., by which time I could 
hardly move. Our next train started at six, 
but I was so stiff and exhausted that I begged 
my father to wait over one day to rest, to 
which he consented. At this place we struck 
General Sherman's track, and here the ruin 
and desolation was complete. Hardly any 
of the town remained ; street after street was 
merely one long line of blackened ruins, 
which showed from their size and beautifully 
laid-out gardens, how handsome some of the 
houses had been. It was too horrible ! 

On Thursday, at six a.m., we again set 
off, going about thirty miles in a cattle van 
which brought us to the Columbia River, the 
bridge over which Sherman had destroyed. 
This we crossed on a pontoon bridge, after 



i 



10 



A Georgia Plantation. 



which we walked a mile, sat two hours in 
the woods, and were then picked up by a 
rickety old car which was backed down to 
where we were, and where the rails began 
again, having been torn up behind us. In 
this, at the rate of about five miles an 
hour, we travelled until four in the after- 
noon, when we were again deposited in the 
woods, the line this time being torn up in 
front of us. Here, after another wait, we 
were packed into a rough army waggon, 
w4th loose boards put across for seats, and in 
which we were jolted and banged about over 
a road composed entirely of ruts and roots 
for four more hours, until I thought I should 
not have a whole bone left in my body. 

It was a lovely evening however, and the 
moon rose full and clear. The air, delicious 
and balmy, was filled with the resinous scent 
of the pine and perfume of yellow jessamine, 
and we were a very jolly party, four gentlemen, 
with ourselves, making up our number, so I 
thought it good fun on the whole. In fact, 



Chaos. 



i i 



rough as the journey was, I rather enjoyed it 
all ; it was so new a chapter in my book of 
travels. 

Between nine and ten in the evening we 
arrived at a log cabin, where, until three a.m. 
we sat on the floor round a huge wood fire. 
The train then arrived and we started again, 
and did not stop for twenty-four hours ; 
at least, when I say did not stop, I mean, 
did not leave the cars, for we really seemed 
to do little else but stop every few minutes. 
This brought us, at three a.m., to Augusta, 
where we were allowed to go to bed for three 
hours, starting again at six and travelling all 
day, until at seven in the evening we at last 
reached Savannah. Fortunately we started 
from the North with a large basket of pro- 
visions, that being our only luggage, the 
trunks having been sent by sea; and had it 
not been for this, I think we certainly should 
have starved, as we were not able to get 
anything to eat on the road, except at 
Columbia and Augusta. 



12 



A Georgia Plantation. 



The morning after our arrival in Savannah, 
my father came into my room to say he was 
off to the plantation at once, having seen 
some gentlemen the evening before, who 
told him if he wished to do anything at all in 
the way of planting this season, that he must 
not lose an hour, as it was very doubtful 
even now if a crop could be got in. So off 
he went, promising to return as soon as 
possible, and report what state of things he 
found on the island. I consoled myself by 
going off to church to hear Bishop Elliott, 
who preached one of the most beautiful 
sermons I ever heard, on the Resurrection, 
the one thought that can bring hope and 
comfort to these poor heart-broken people. 
There was hardly anyone at church out of 
deep mourning, and it was piteous to see 
so many mere girls' faces, shaded by deep 
crape veils and widows' caps. 

I can hardly give a true idea of how 
crushed and sad the people are. You hear no 
bitterness towards the North ; they are too 



Chaos. 



13 



sad to be bitter ; their grief is overwhelming. 
Nothing can make any difference to them 
now ; the women live in the past, and the 
men only in the daily present, trying, in a 
listless sort of way, to repair their ruined 
fortunes. They are like so many foreigners, 
whose only interest in the country is their 
own individual business. Politics are never 
mentioned, and they know and care less 
about what is going on in Washington than 
in London. They received us with open 
arms, my room was filled with flowers, and 
crowds of people called upon me every day, 
and overwhelmed me with thanks for what I 
did for their soldiers during the war, which 
really did amount to but very little. I say 
this, and the answer invariably is, ' Oh yes, 
but your heart was with us,' which it certainly 
was. 

We had, before leaving the North, re- 
ceived two letters from Georgia, one from 
an agent 'of the Freedmen's Bureau, and 
the other from one of our neighbours, both 



14 



A Georgia Plantation. 



stating very much the same thing, which was 
that our former slaves had all returned to the 
island and were willing and ready to work 
for us, but refused to engage themselves to 
anyone else, even to their liberators, the 
Yankees ; but that they were very badly off, 
short of provisions, and would starve if some- 
thing were not done for them at once, and, 
unless my father came directly (so wrote the 
agent of the Freedmen's Bureau), the negroes 
would be removed and made to work else- 
where. 

On Wednesday, when my father returned, 
he reported that he had found the negroes all 
on the place, not only those who were there 
five years ago, but many who were sold 
three years before that. Seven had worked 
their way back from the up country. They 
received him very affectionately, and made 
an agreement with him to work for one half 
the crop, which agreement it remained to 
be seen if they would keep. Owing to our 
coming so late, only a small crop could be 



Chaos. 



planted, enough to make seed for another 
year and clear expenses. I was sorry we 
could do no more, but too thankful that 
things were as promising as they were. 
Most of the finest plantations were lying idle 
for want of hands to work them, so many of 
the negroes had died ; 1 7,000 deaths were 
recorded by the Freedmen's Bureau alone. 
Many had been taken to the South-west, and 
others preferred hanging about the towns, 
making a few dollars now and then, to work- 
ing regularly on the plantations ; so most 
people found it impossible to get any labour- 
ers, but we had as many as we wanted, and 
nothing could induce our people to go any- 
where else. My father also reported that 
the house was bare, not a bed nor chair left, 
and that he had been sleeping on the floor, 
with a piece of wood for a pillow and a few 
negro blankets for his covering. This I 
could hardly do, and as he could attend to 
nothing but the planting, we agreed that he 
should devote himself to that, while I looked 



1 6 A Georgia Plantation. 

after some furniture. So the day after, 
armed with five hundred bushels of seed rice, 
corn, bacon, a straw mattress, and a tub, he 
started off again for the plantation, leaving 
me to buy tables and chairs, pots and pans. 

We heard that our overseer had removed 
many of the things to the interior with the 
negroes for safety on the approach of the 
Yankees, so I wrote to him about them, 
waiting to know what he had saved of our 
old furniture, before buying anything new. 
This done, I decided to proceed with my 
household goods to the plantation, arrange 
things as comfortably as possible, and then 
return to the North. 

I cannot give a better idea of the con- 
dition of things I found on the Island than 
by copying the following letter written at the 
time. 

April 12, 1866. 

Dearest S , I have relapsed into 

barbarism total ! How I do wish you could 
see me ; you would be so disgusted. Well, I 



Chaos, 17 

know now what the necessaries of life mean, 
and am surprised to find how few they are, 
and how many things we consider absolutely 
necessary which are really luxuries. 

When I wrote last I was waiting in 
Savannah for the arrival of some things the 
overseer had taken from the Island, which I 
wished to look over before I made any 
further purchases for the house. When they 
came, however, they looked more like the 
possessions of an Irish emigrant than any- 
thing else ; the house linen fortunately was 
in pretty good order, but the rest I fancy had 
furnished the overseer's house in the country 
ever since the war ; the silver never re- 
appeared. So I began my purchases with 
twelve common wooden chairs, four wash- 
stands, four bedsteads, four large tubs, two 
bureaux, two large tables and four smaller 
ones, some china, and one common lounge, 
my one luxury — and this finished the list. 

Thus supplied, my maid and I started 
last Saturday morning for the Island ; half- 

C 



1 8 A Georgia Plantation. 

way down we stuck fast on a sand -bar in the 
river, where we remained six hours, very hot, 
and devoured by sand-flies, till the tide came 
in again and floated us off, which pleasant little 
episode brought us to Darien at i a.m. My 
father was there, however, to meet us with 
our own boat, and as it was bright moonlight 
we got off* with all our things, and were 
rowed across to the island by four of our old 
negroes. 

I wish I could give you any idea of the 
house. The floors were bare, of course, many 
of the panes were out of the windows, and the 
plaster in many places was off the walls, 
while one table and two old chairs constituted 
the furniture. It was pretty desolate, and 
my father looked at me in some anxiety to 
see how it would affect me, and seemed 
greatly relieved when I burst out laughing. 
My bed was soon unpacked and made, my 
tub filled, my basin and pitcher mounted on 
a barrel, and I settled for the rest of the 
night. 



Chaos. 19 

The next morning I and my little German 
maid, who fortunately takes everything very 
cheerily, went to work, and together we made 
things quite comfortable ; unpacked oar tables 
and chairs, put up some curtains (made out 
of some white muslin I had brought down 
for petticoats) edged with pink calico, covered 
the tables with two bright-coloured covers I 
found in the trunk of house linen, had the 
windows mended, hung up my picture of 
General Lee (which had been sent to me 
the day before I left Philadelphia) over the 
mantelpiece, and put my writing things and 
nicknacks on the table, so that when my 

father and Mr. J came in they looked 

round in perfect astonishment, and quite re- 
warded me by their praise. 

Our kitchen arrangements would amuse 
you. I have one large pot, one frying-pan, 
one tin saucepan, and this is all ; and yet you 
would be astonished to see how much our 
cook accomplishes with these three utensils, 
and the things don't taste very much alike. 



20 



A Georgia Plantation. 



Yesterday one of the negroes shot and gave 
me a magnificent wild turkey, which we 
roasted on one stick set up between two 
others before the fire, and capital it was. The 
broiling is done on two old pieces of iron laid 
over the ashes. Our food consists of corn 
and rice bread, rice, and fish caught fresh 
every morning out of the river, oysters, turtle 
soup, and occasionally a wild turkey or duck. 
Other meat, as yet, it is impossible to get. 

Is it not all strange and funny ? I feel 
like Robinson Crusoe with three hundred 
men Fridays. Then my desert really blooms 
like the rose. On the acre of ground enclosed 
about the house are a superb magnolia tree, 
covered with its queenly flowers, roses run- 
ning wild in every direction ; orange, fig, and 
peach trees now in blossom, give promise of 
fruit later on, while every tree and bush is 
alive with red- birds, mocking-birds, black- 
birds, and jays, so as I sit on the piazza the 
air comes to me laden with sweet smells and 
sweet sounds of all descriptions. 



Chaos. 



21 



There are some drawbacks ; fleas, sand- 
flies, and mosquitoes remind us that we are not 
quite in Heaven, and I agree with my laundry 
woman, Phillis, who upon my maid's remon- 
strating with her for taking all day to wash a 
few towels, replied, ' Dat's true, Miss Louisa, 
but de fleas jist have no principle, and dey 
bites me so all de time, I jist have to stop 
to scratch.' 

The negroes seem perfectly happy at 
getting back to the old place and having us 
there, and I have been deeply touched by 
many instances of devotion on their part. 
On Sunday morning, after their church, 
having nothing to do, they all came to see 
me, and I must have shaken hands with 
nearly four hundred. They were full of their 
troubles and sufferings up the country during 
the war, and the invariable winding up was, 
' Tank the Lord, missus, we's back, and sees 
you and massa again.' I said to about twenty 
strong men, ' Well, you know you are free and 
your own masters now,' when they broke out 



22 A Georgia Plantation. 

with, ' No, missus, we belong to you ; we be 
yours as long as we lib.' 

Nearly all who have lived through the 
terrible suffering of these past four years 
have come back, as well as many of those 
who were sold seven years ago. Their good 
character was so well known throughout the 
State that people were very anxious to hire 
them and induce them to remain in the s up 
country,' and told them all sorts of stories to 
keep them, among others that my father 
was dead, but all in vain. One old man said, 
' If massa be dead den, I'll go back to the old 
place and mourn for him.' So they not only 
refused good wages, but in many cases spent 
all they had to get back, a fact that speaks 
louder than words as to their feeling for their 
old master and former treatment. 

Our overseer, who was responsible for all 
our property, has little or nothing to give us 
back, while everything that was left in charge 
of the negroes has been taken care of and 
given back to us without the hope or wish of 



Chaos. 



23 



reward. One old man has guarded the stock 
so well from both Southern and Northern 
marauders, that he has now ninety odd sheep 
and thirty cows under his care. Unfortunately 
they are on a pine tract some twelve miles 
away up the river, and as we have no means 
of transporting them we cannot get them 
until next year. 

One old couple came up yesterday from 
St. Simon's, Uncle John and Mum Peggy, 
with five dollars in silver half-dollars tied up 
in a bag, which they said a Yankee captain 
had given them the second year of the war 
for some chickens, and this money these two 
old people had kept through all their want 
and suffering for three years because it had 
been paid for fowls belonging to us. I 
wonder whether white servants would be so 
faithful or honest ! My father was much 
moved at this act of faithfulness, and intends 
to have something made out of the silver to 
commemorate the event, having returned 
them the same amount in other money. 



7 



24 A Georgia Plantation. 

One of the great difficulties of this new 
state of things is, what is to be done with the 
old people who are too old, and the children 
who are too young, to work ? One Northern 
General said to a planter, in answer to this 
question, ' Well, I suppose they must die/ 
which, indeed, seems the only thing for them 

to do. To-day Mr. J tells me my father 

has agreed to support the children for three 
years, and the old people till they die, that 
is, feed and clothe them. Fortunately, as we 
have some property at the North we are able 
to do this, but most of the planters are utterly 
ruined and have no money to buy food for 
their own families, so on their plantations I 
do not see what else is to become of the 
negroes who cannot work except to die. 

Yours affectionately, 

F.— 

The prospect of getting in the crop did 
not grow more promising as time went on. 
The negroes talked a great deal about their 



Chaos. 25 

desire and intention to work for us, but their 
idea of work, unaided by the stern law of 
necessity, is very vague, some of them work- 
ing only half a day and some even less. I 
don't think one does a really honest full day's 
work, and so of course not half the necessary 
amount is done and I am afraid never will 
be again, and so our properties will soon be 
utterly worthless, for no crop can be raised 
by such labour as this, and no negro will 
work if he can help it, and is quite satisfied 
just to scrape along doing an odd job here 
and there to earn money enough to buy a 
little food. 1 They are affectionate and often 
trustworthy and honest, but so hopelessly 
lazy as to be almost worthless as labourers. 

My father was quite encouraged at first, 
the people seemed so willing to work and 
said so much about their intention of doing 
so ; but not many days after they started he 
came in quite disheartened, saying that half 

1 N.B. I was mistaken. In the years 1877 and 1880 up- 
wards of thirty thousand bushels of rice was raised on the 
place by these same negroes. 



26 A Georgia Plantation. 

the hands had left the fields at one o'clock 
and the rest by three o'clock, and this just at 
our busiest time. Half a day's work will 
keep them from starving, but won't raise a 
crop. Our contract with them is for half 
the crop ; that is, one half to be divided 
among them, according to each man's rate of 
work, we letting them have in the meantime 
necessary food, clothing, and money for their 
present wants (as they have not a penny) 
which is to be deducted from whatever is due 
to them at the end of the year. 

This we found the best arrangement to 
make with them, for if we paid them wages, 
the first five dollars they made would have 
seemed like so large a sum to them, that they 
would have imagined their fortunes made 
and refused to work any more. But even this 
arrangement had its objections, for they told 
us, when they missed working two or three 
days a week, that they were losers by it as 
well as ourselves, half the crop being theirs. 
But they could not see that this sort of work 



Chaos. 



27 



would not raise any crop at all, and that such 
should be the result was quite beyond their 
comprehension. They were quite convinced 
that if six days' work would raise a whole 
crop, three days' work would raise half a one, 
with which they as partners were satisfied, 
and so it seemed as if we should have to be 
too. 

The rice plantation becoming unhealthy 
early in May, we removed to St. Simon's, a 
sea island on the coast, about fifteen miles 
from Butler's Island, where the famous Sea 
Island cotton had formerly been raised. 
This place had been twice in possession of 
the Northern troops during the war, and the 
negroes had consequently been brought under 
the influence of Northerners, some of whom 
had filled the poor people's minds with all 
sorts of vain hopes and ideas, among others 
that their former masters would not be 
allowed to return, and the land was theirs, a 
thing many of them believed, and they had 
planted both corn and cotton to a consider- 



28 



A Georgia Plantation. 



able extent. To disabuse their minds of 
this notion my father determined to put in a 
few acres of cotton, although the lateness of 
the season and work at Butler's Island pre- 
vented planting of any extent being done this 
season. 

Our departure from one place and arrival 
at another was very characteristic. The house 
on St. Simon's being entirely stripped of 
furniture, we had to take our scanty provision 
of household goods down with us from 
Butler's Island by raft, our only means of 
transportation. Having learned from the 
negroes that the tide turned at six a.m., and 
to reach St. Simon's that day it would be 
necessary to start on the first of the ebb, we 
went to bed the night before, all agreeing to 
get up at four t&e next morning, so as to 
have our beds &c. on board and ready to 

start by six. By five, Mr. J , my maid, 

and I were ready and our things on board, 
but nothing would induce my father to get 
up until eight o'clock, when he appeared on 



Chaos. 



29 



the wharf in his dressing-gown, clapped his 
hands to his head, exclaiming, ' My gracious ! 
that flat should be off; just look at the tide,' 
which indeed had then been running down 
two good hours. Without a word I had his 
bedroom furniture put on, and ordered the 
men to push off, which they did just as my 
father reappeared, calling out that half his 
things had been left behind, a remark which 
was fortunately useless as far as the flat was 
concerned, as it was rapidly disappearing on 
the swift current down the river. 

At three o'clock we started in a large six- 
oared boat, with all the things forgotten in 
the morning piled in. The day was cloudless, 
the air soft and balmy ; the wild semi-tropical 
vegetation that edged the river on both sides 
beautiful beyond description ; the tender 
new spring green of the deciduous trees 
and shrubs, mingling with the dark green of 
the evergreen cypress, magnolia, and bay, all 
wreathed and bound together with the yellow 
jessamine and fringed with the soft delicate 



30 



A Georgia Plantation. 



grey moss which floated from every branch 
and twig. Not a sound broke the stillness but 
the dip of our oars in the water, accompanied 
by the wild minor chant of the negro boat- 
men, who sang nearly the whole way down, 
keeping time with the stroke of the oar. 

Half-way down we passed the unfortunate 
raft stuck in the mud, caught by the turning 
tide. Unable to help it, we left it to wait 
the return of the ebb, not however without 
painful reflections, as we had had no dinner 
before starting, and our cook with his frying- 
pan and saucepan, was perched on a bag of 
rice on the raft. 

Shortly after five o'clock we reached St. 
Simon's, and found the house a fair-sized 
comfortable building, with a wide piazza 
running all round it, but without so much as a 
stool or bench in it. So, hungry and tired, we 
sat down on the floor, to await the arrival of 
the things. Night came on, but we had no 
candles, and so sat on in darkness till after 
ten o'clock, when the raft arrived with almost 



Chaos. 



3i 



everything soaked through, the result of a 
heavy thunder shower which had come on 
while it was stuck fast. This I confess was 
more than I could bear, and I burst out 
crying. A little cold meat and some bread 
consoled me somewhat, and finding the 
blankets had fortunately escaped the wetting, 
we spread these on the floor over the wet 
mattresses, and, all dressed, slowly and sadly 
laid us down to sleep. 

The next morning the sun was shining 
as it only can shine in a southern sky, and 
the birds were singing as they only can sing 
in such sunlight. The soft sea air blew in 
at the window, mingled with the aromatic 
fragrance of the pines, and I forgot all my 
miseries, and was enchanted and happy. 
After breakfast, which was a repetition of 
last night's supper, with the addition of milk- 
less tea, I set about seeing how the house 
could be made comfortable. There were four 
good-sized rooms down and two upstairs, 
with a hall ten feet wide running - through the 



32 



A Georgia Plantation. 



house, and a wide verandah shut in from the 
sun by Venetian shades running round it ; 
the kitchen, with the servants' quarters, was 
as usual detached. A nice enough house, 
capable of being made both pretty and com- 
fortable, which in time I hope to do. 

My father spent the time in talking to the 
negroes, of whom there were about fifty on 
the place, making arrangements with them 
for work, more to establish his right to the 
place than from any real good we expect to 
do this year. We found them in a very 
different frame of mind from the negroes on 
Butler's Island, who having been removed 
the first year of the war, had never been 
brought into contact with either army, and 
remained the same demonstrative and noisy 
childish people they had always been. The 
negroes on St. Simon's had always been the 
most intelligent, having belonged to an older 
estate, and a picked lot, but besides, they 
had tasted of the tree of knowledge. They 
were perfectly respectful, but quiet, and 



Chaos. 33 

evidently disappointed to find they were not 
the masters of the soil and that their new 
friends the Yankees had deceived them. 
Many of them had planted a considerable 
quantity of corn and cotton, and this my 
father told them they might have, but that 
they must put in twenty acres for him, for 
which he would give them food and clothing, 
and another year, when he hoped to put in 
several hundred acres, they should share the 
crop. They consented without any show of 
either pleasure or the reverse, and went to 
work almost immediately under the old negro 
foreman or driver, who had managed the 
place before the war. 

They still showed that they had confi- 
dence in my father, for when a miserable 
creature, an agent of the Freedmens Bureau, 
who was our ruler then, and regulated all 
our contracts with our negroes, told them 
that they would be fools to believe that my 
father would really let them have all the 
crops they had planted before he came, and 

D 



34 



A Georgia Plantation. 



they would see that he would claim at least 
half, they replied, ■ No, sir, our master is a 
just man ; he has never lied to us, and we 
believe him.' Rather taken aback by this, 
he turned to an old driver who was the 
principal person present, and said, ' Why, 
Bram, how can you care so much for your 
master — he sold you a few years ago ? ' ' Yes, 
sir,' replied the old man, ' he sold me and I 
was very unhappy, but he came to me and 
said, " Bram, I am in great trouble ; I have no 
money and I have to sell some of the people, 
but I know where you are all going to, and 
will buy you back again as soon as I can." 
And, sir, he told me, Juba, my old wife, must 
go with me, for though she was not strong, 
and the gentleman who bought me would not 
buy her, master said he could not let man 
and wife be separated ; and so, sir, I said, 
" Master, if you will keep me I will work for 
you as long as I live, but if you in trouble 
and it help you to sell me, sell me, master, I 
am willing." And now that we free, I come 



Chaos. 



35 



back to my old home and my old master, 
and stay here till I die." ' This story the 
agent told a Northern friend of ours in utter 
astonishment. 

To show what perfect confidence my 
father had on his side in his old slaves, the 
day after starting the work here, he returned 
to Butler's Island, leaving me and my maid 
entirely alone, with no white person within 
eight miles of us, and in a house on no door 
of which was there more than a latch, and 
neither then nor afterwards, when I was alone 
on the plantation with the negroes for weeks 
at a time, had I the slightest feeling of fear, 
except one night, when I had a fright which 
made me quite ill for two days, although it 
turned out to be a most absurd cause of 
terror. The quiet and solitude of the planta- 
tion was absolute, and at night there was not 
. a movement, the negro settlement being" two 
miles away from the house. ^ 

I was awaked one night about two o'clock 
by a noise at the river landing, which was not 

D 2 



36 



A Georgia Plantation. 



the eighth of a mile from the house, and on 
listening, heard talking, shouting, and appar- 
ently struggling. I got up and called my little 
German maid, who after listening a moment 
said, ' It is a fight, and I think the men are 
drunk.' Knowing that it could not be our 
own men, I made up my mind that a party 
of strange and drunken negroes were trying 
to land, and that my people were trying to 
prevent them. Knowing how few my people 
were, I felt for one moment utterly terrified 
and helpless, as indeed I was. Then I took 
two small pistols my father had left with me, 
and putting them full cock, and followed by 
my maid, who I must say was wonderfully 
brave, I proceeded out of the house to the 
nearest hut, where my man servant lived. I 
was a little reassured to hear his voice in 
answer when I called, and I sent him down 
to the river to see what was the matter. It 
turned out to be a raft full of mules from 
Butler's Island, which I had not expected, 
and who objected to being landed, hence the 



Chaos. 37 

struggling and shouting. I had been too 
terrified to laugh, and suddenly becoming 
aware of the two pistols at full cock in my 
hands, was then seized with my natural terror 
of firearms. So I laid them, full cocked as 
they were, in a drawer, where they remained 
for several days, until my father came and 
uncocked them. This was my only real 
fright, although for the next two or three 
years we were constantly hearing wild 
rumours of intended negro insurrections, 
which however, as I never quite believed, 
did not frighten me. 

I had a pretty hard time of it that first 
year, owing to my wretched servants, and to 
the scarcity of provisions of all sorts. The 
country was absolutely swept ; not a chicken, 
not an egg was left, and for weeks I lived 
on hominy, rice, and fish, with an occasional 
bit of venison. The negroes said the Yankees 
had eaten up everything, and one old woman 
told me they had refused to pay her for the 
eggs, but after they had eaten them said 



38 A Georgia Plantation. 

they were addled ; but I think the people 
generally had not much to complain of. 
The only two good servants we had re- 
mained with my father at Butler's Island, 
and mine were all raw field hands, to whom 
everything was new and strange, and who 
were really savages. My white maid, watch- 
ing my sable housemaid one morning 
through the door, saw her dip my tooth- 
brush in the tub in which I had just bathed, 
and with my small hand-glass in the other 
hand, in which she was attentively regarding 
the operation, proceed to scrub her teeth 
with the brush. It is needless to say I pre- 
sented her with that one, and locked my new 
one up as soon as I had finished using it. 

My cook made all the flour and sugar I 
gave him (my own allowance of which was 
very small) into sweet cakes, most of which 
he ate himself, and when I scolded him, 
cried. The young man who was with us, 
dying of consumption, was my chief anxiety, 
for he was terribly ill, and could not eat the 



Chaos. 



39 



fare I did, and to get anything else was an 
impossibility. I scoured the island one day 
in search of chickens, but only succeeded in 
getting one old cock, of which my wretched 

cook made such a mess that Mr. J could 

not touch it after it was done. I tried my 
own hand at cooking, but without much 
success, not knowing really how to cook a 
potato, besides which the roof of the kitchen 
leaked badly, and as we had frequent 
showers, I often had to cook, holding up an 
umbrella in one hand and stirring with the 
other. 

I remained on St. Simon's Island until 
the end of July, my father coming down 
from Butler's Island from Saturday till 
Monday every week for rest, which he sorely 
needed, for although he had got the negroes 
into something like working order, they re- 
quired constant personal supervision, which 
on the rice fields in midsummer was fright- 
fully trying, particularly as, after the day's 
work was over, he had to row a mile across 



40 



A Georgia Plantation. 



the river, and then drive out six miles to the 
hut in the pine woods where he slept. The 
salt air, quiet, and peace of St. Simon's was 
therefore a delightful rest and change, and 
he refused to give an order when he came 
down, referring all the negroes to me. One 
man whom he had put off in this way 
several times, revenged himself one day 
when my father told him to get a mule cart 
ready, by saying, ' Does missus say so ? ' 
which, however, was more fun than impu- 
dence. 

I will finish my account of this year by 
copying a letter written on the spot at the 
time. 

Hampton Point : July 9, 1866. 

Dearest S — , I did not expect to write 

to you again from my desert island. Aber ich 
bin als noch hier, rapidly approaching the 
pulpy gelatinous state. Three times have I 
settled upon a day for leaving, and three 
times have I put it off ; the truth is, I am 
very busy, very useful, and very happy. 



Chaos. 



4i 



Then I am anxious about leaving my father, 
for fear the unusual exposure to this Southern 
sun may make him ill ; and with no doctor, 
no nurse, no medicine, and no proper food 
nearer than Savannah, it would be a serious 
thing to be ill here. 

I am just learning to be an experienced 
cook and doctress, for the negroes come to 
me with every sort of complaint to be treated, 
and I prescribe for all, pills and poultices 
being my favourite remedies. I was rather 
nervous about it at first, but have grown 
bolder since I find what good results always 
follow my doses. Faith certainly has a great 
deal to do with it, and that is unbounded on 
the part of my patients, who would swallow 
a red-hot poker if I ordered it. 

The other day an old woman of over 
eighty came for a dose, so I prescribed a 
small one of castor oil, which pleased her so 
much she returned the next day to have it 
repeated, and again a third time, on which 
I remonstrated and said, ' No, Mum Charlotte, 



42 



A Georgia Plantation. 



you are too old to be dosing yourself so.' To 
which she replied, ' Den, dear missus, do 
give me some for put on outside, for ain't 
you me mudder ? ' 

We are living directly on the Point, in the 
house formerly occupied by the overseer, a 
much pleasanter and prettier situation, I think, 
than the Hill House, in which you lived when 
you were here. Of course it is all very rough 
and overgrown now, but with the pretty water 
view across which you look to the wide 
stretch of broad green salt marsh, which at 
sunset turns the most wonderful gold bronze 
colour, and the magnolia, orange, and superb 
live oak trees around and near the house, 
it might, by a little judicious clearing and 
pruning, be made quite lovely, and if I am 
here next winter, as I suppose I shall be, 
I shall try my hand at a little landscape- 
gardening. 

The fishing is grand, and we have fresh 
fish for breakfast, dinner, and tea. Our fisher- 
man, one of our old slaves, is a great character, 



Chaos. 



43 



and quite as enthusiastic about fishing as I 
am. I have been out once or twice with 
him, but not for deep-sea fishing yet, which 
however I hope to do soon, as he brings 
in the most magnificent bass, and blue fish 
weighing twenty and thirty pounds. The other 
day when we were out it began to thunder, 
and he said, ' Dere missus, go home. No use 
to fish more. De fish mind de voice of de 
Lord better dan we poor mortals, and when 
it tunders dey go right down to de bottom 
of de sea.' 

I have two little pet bears, the funniest, 
j oiliest little beasts imaginable. They have no 
teeth, being only six weeks old, and have to 
be fed on milk, which they will drink out of 
a dish if I hold it very quietly, but if I make 
the least noise they rush off, get up on their 
hind legs, and hiss and. spit at me like cats. 
One spends his time turning summersets, 
and the other lies flat on his back, with his 
two little paws over his nose. They are too 
delightful. 



44 



A Georgia Plantation. 



I have been very fortunate in my weather, 
for although the days are terribly hot, there 
is always a pleasant sea-breeze, and the 
evenings and nights are delightfully cool. 
In fact I have suffered much less from the 
heat here than I usually do near Phila- 
delphia in summer. The great trouble is 
that I cannot walk at all on account of the 
snakes, of which I live in terror. The day- 
time is too hot for them, and they take 
their walks abroad in the cool of the even- 
iug. 

Last evening I was sauntering up the 
road, when about a quarter of a mile from 
the house I saw something moving very 
slowly across the path. At first I thought 
it was a cat, crouching as they do just before 
they spring, but in a moment more I saw it 
was a huge rattlesnake, as large round as 
my arm and quite six feet long. Two little 
birds were hovering over him, fluttering lower 
and lower every moment, fascinated by his 
evil eye and forked tongue which kept dart- 



Chaos. 



45 



ing in and out. He was much too busy to 
notice me, so after looking at him for one 
moment I flew back to the house, shrieking 
with all my might, 'Pierce! John! Alex! 
William!' Hearing my voice they all rushed 
out, and, armed with sticks, axes, and spades, 
we proceeded to look for the monster, who 
however had crawled into the thick bushes 
when we had reached the spot, and although 
we could hear him rattle violently when we 
struck the bushes, the negroes could not see 
him, and were afraid to go into the thick 
undergrowth after him, so he still lives to 
walk abroad, and I — to stay at home. 

Mr. James Hamilton Cooper died last 
week, and was buried at the little church on 
the island here yesterday. The whole thing 
was sad in the extreme, and a fit illustration 
of this people and country. Three years ago 
he was smitten with paralysis, the result of 
grief at the loss of his son, loss of his pro- 
perty, and the ruin of all his hopes and 
prospects ; since which his life has been one 



4 6 



A Georgia Plantation. 



of great suffering, until a few days ago, when 
death released him. Hearing from his son 
of his death, and the time fixed for his 
funeral, my father and I drove down in the 
old mule cart, our only conveyance, nine 
miles to the church. Here a most terrible 
scene of desolation met us. The steps of the 
church were broken down, so we had to walk 
up a plank to get in ; the roof was fallen in, 
so that the sun streamed down on our heads ; 
while the seats were all cut up and marked 
with the names of Northern soldiers, who 
had been quartered there during the war. 
The graveyard was so overgrown with 
weeds and bushes, and tangled with cob- 
web like grey moss, that we had difficulty in 
making our way through to the freshly dug 
grave. 

In about half an hour the funeral party 
arrived. The coffin was in a cart drawn by 
one miserable horse, and was followed by 
the Cooper family on foot, having come this 
way from the landing, two miles off. From 



( 



Chaos. 47 

the cart to the grave the coffin was carried 
by four old family negroes, faithful to the 
end. Standing there I said to myself, ' Some 
day justice will be done, and the Truth shall 
be heard above the political din of slander 
and lies, and the Northern people shall see 
things as they are, and not through the dark 
veil of envy, hatred, and malice.' Good-bye. 
I sail on the 21st for the North. 

Yours affectionately, 

F 



• 



4 8 



A Georgia Plantation. 



CHAPTER II. 

A FRESH START. 

My return to the South in 1867 was much 
later than I had expected it would be when 
I left the previous summer, but my father 
was repairing the house on Butler's Island, 
and put off my coming, hoping to have things 
more comfortable for me. When, however, 
March came, and it was still unfinished, I 
determined to wait no longer, but if necessary 
to go direct to St. Simon's, and not to Butler's 
Island at all. Wishing to make our habitation 
more comfortable than it was last year, I 
took from the North six large boxes, contain- 
ing carpets, curtains, books, and various house- 
hold articles, and accompanied by my maid, a 
negro lad I had taken up with me, named 



A Fresh Start. 49 

Pierce, and a little girl of ten, whom I was 
taking South for companionship, I started 
again for Georgia on March 10. 

Owing to a mistake about my ticket I 
took the wrong route, went two hundred 
miles out of my way, and found myself one 
night, or rather morning at 2 a.m., landed in 
Augusta, where I was forced to remain until 
six the next morning, and where I had never 
been before and did not know anyone even 
by name. I felt rather nervous, but picking 
out the most respectable-looking man among 
my fellow-travellers, I asked him to recom- 
mend me to the best hotel in Augusta, which 
he did, and on my arriving at it found to my 
great joy that it was kept by Mr. Nickleson, 
formerly of the Mills House, Charleston, who 
knew who I was perfectly, received me most 
courteously, and after giving me first a com- 
fortable bed, and then a good breakfast, sent 
me off the following morning with a nice little 
luncheon put up, a most necessary considera- 
tion, for it was impossible to get anything to 

E 



50 A Georgia Plantation. 

eat on the road, and the day before we had 
nothing but some biscuits and an orange 
which we happened to have brought with us. 
We reached Savannah that evening, having 
been exactly ninety-four hours on the road, 
with no longer rest than the one at Augusta 
of four hours. 

In Savannah I remained a week, and the 
following Saturday started for St. Simon's 
Island, sticking fast in the mud as usual, and 
being delayed in consequence six hours. The 

K 's were on board with us, returning to 

their home for the first time since the war, 
bringing with them all their household goods 
and chattels; and a funnier sight than our 
disembarkation was never seen, as we looked 
like a genuine party of emigrants. The little 
wharf was covered with beds, tables, chairs, 
ploughs, pots, pans, boxes, and trunks, for we 
also had quantities of things of all kinds. A 
mule cart awaited us and an ox cart them, 
into which elegant conveyance we clambered, 
surrounded by our beds and pots and pans, 



A Fresh Start. 51 

and solemnly took our departure, each in a 
separate direction, for the opposite ends of the 
island. 

I had not gone far when I met Major 

D , a young Philadelphia!!, who with his 

brother had rented a plantation next ours, and 
who is the proud possessor of a horse and 
waggon, in which he kindly offered to drive 
me to Hampton Point, an offer I very gladly 
accepted, thereby reaching my destination 
sooner than I should otherwise have done. 
I thought things would be better this year, 
but notwithstanding my Northern luxuries, I 
found it much harder to get along. My 
father, finding it impossible to manage the rice 
plantation on Butler's Island and the cotton 

one here, gladly agreed to the Misses D 's 

offer to plant on shares, they undertaking the 
management here, which allowed him to de- 
vote all his time to the other place. The 
consequence is that ' the crop,' being the only 
thing thought of, every able-bodied man, 
woman, and child is engaged on it, and I find 

e 2 



52 



A Georgia Plantation. 



my household staff reduced to two. I in- 
quired after my friend Fisherman George, 
' oh, he was ploughing/ so I could have no fish, 
my cook and his wife have departed alto- 
gether, and my washerwoman and semp- 
stress 'are picking cotton seed/ so Major 

D smilingly informed me, leaving me 

Daphne, w T ho is expecting her eleventh con- 
finement in less than a month, and Alex her 
husband, who invariably is taken ill just as he 
ought to get dinner, and Pierce, who since his 
winter at the North is too fine to do anything 
but wait at table. So I cook, and my maid 
does the housework, and as it has rained hard 
for three days and the kitchen roof is half off, 
I cook in the dining-room or parlour. Fortu- 
nately, my provisions are so limited that I have 
not much to cook ; for five days my food has 
consisted of hard pilot biscuits, grits cooked 
in different ways, oysters, and twice, as a great 
treat, ham and eggs. I brought a box of 
preserves from the North with me, but half 
of them upset, and the rest were spoilt. 



A Fresh Start. 53 

One window is entirely without a sash, so 
I have to keep the shutters closed all the time, 
and over the other I have pasted three pieces 
of paper where panes should be. My bed 
stood under a hole in the roof, through which 
the rain came, and I think if it rains much 
more there will not be a dry spot left in 
the house. However, as I would not wait at 
the North till the house on Butler's Island 
was finished, I have no one to blame for my 
present sufferings but myself, and when I get 
some servants and food from there, I shall be 
better off. 

The people seem to me working fairly 

well, but Major D , used only to Northern 

labour, is in despair, and says they don't do 
more than half a day's work, and that he 
has often to go from house to house to drive 
them out to work, and then has to sit under 
a tree in the field to see they don't run 
away. 

A Mr. G from New York has bought 

Canon's Point, and is going to the greatest 



54 



A Georgia Plantation. 



expense to stock it with mules and farming 
implements of all sorts, insisting upon it that 
we Southerners don't know how to manage 
our own places or negroes, and he will show 
us, but I think he will find out his mistake. 1 
My father reported the negroes on Butler's 

1 The history of Canon's Point is as follows. Mr. G — — 
having started by putting the negroes on regular wages 
expecting them to do regular work in return, and not being 
at all prepared to go through the lengthy conversations and 
explanations which they required, utterly failed in his attempts 
either to manage the negroes or to get any work out of them. 
Some ran off, some turned sulky, and some stayed and did 
about half the work. So that at the end of two years he gave 
the place up in perfect disgust, a little to our amusement, as 
he had been so sure, like many another Northern man, that 
all the negroes wanted was regular work and regular wages, 
overlooking entirely the character of the people he was 
dealing with, who required a different treatment every day 
almost ; sometimes coaxing, sometimes scolding, sometimes 
punishing, sometimes indulging, and always — unlimited 

patience. After Mr. G failed in his management of the 

negroes he gave the place up, leaving an agent there merely 
to keep possession of the property. This man in turn moved 
off, leaving about fifty negro families in undisputed posses- 
sion, who two years later were driven off by a new tenant 
who undertook to charge them high rent for their land ; and 
it is now finally in the hands of a Western farmer and his 
son, who told my husband last winter that they were delighted 
with the place and climate, but had not learned to manage 
the negroes yet, as when he scolded them they got scared 
and ran off, and when he did not they would not work. 



A Fresh Start. 



55 



Island as working very well, although requir- 
ing constant supervision. That they shduld 
be working well is a favourable sign of their 
improved steadiness, for, as last year's crop 
is not yet sold, no division has been possible. 
So they have begun a second year, not hav- 
ing yet been paid for the first, and meanwhile 
they are allowed to draw what food, clothing, 
and money they want, all of which I fear 
will make trouble when the day of settlement 
comes, but it is pleasant to see how completely 
they trust us. 

On both places the work is done on the 
old system, by task. We tried working by the 
day, indeed I think we were obliged to do so 
by the agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, to 
whom all our contracts had to be submitted, 
but we found it did not answer at all, the 
negroes themselves begging to be allowed to 
go back to the old task system. One man 

indignantly asked Major D what the use 

of being free was, if he had to work harder 
than when he was a slave. To which Major 



56 



A Georgia Plantation. 



D— — exasperated by their laziness, replied 
that they would find being free meant harder 
work than they had ever done before, or 
starvation. 

In all other ways the work went on just 
as it did in the old times. The force, of about 
three hundred, was divided into gangs, each 
working under a head man — the old negro 
drivers, who are now called captains, out of 
compliment to the changed times. These men 
make a return of the work each night, and it 
is very amusing to hear them say, as each 
man's name is called, ' He done him work ; ' 
'He done half him task;' or 'Ain't sh'um' 
(have not seen him). They often did overwork 
when urged, and were of course credited for 
the same on the books. To make them do 
odd jobs was hopeless, as I found when I got 
some hands from Butler's Island, and tried to 
make them clear up the grounds about the 
house, cut the undergrowth and make a 
garden, &c. Unless I stayed on the spot all 
the time, the instant I disappeared they dis- 



A Fresh Start. 



57 



appeared as well. On one occasion, having 
succeeded in getting a couple of cows, I set a 
man to churn some butter. After leaving 
him for a few moments, I returned to find him 
sitting on the floor with the churn between 
his legs, turning the handle slowly, about 
once a minute. ' Cato/ I exclaimed, ' that 
will never do. You must turn just as fast as 
ever you can to make butter ! ' Looking up 
very gravely, he replied, ' Missus, in dis 
country de butter must be coaxed ; der no 
good to hurry.' And I generally found that 
if I wanted a thing done I first had to tell the 
negroes to do it, then show them how, and 
finally do it myself. Their way of managing 
not to do it was very ingenious, for they 
always were perfectly good-tempered, and 
received my orders with, ' Dat's so, missus ; 
just as missus says,' and then always some- 
how or other left the thing undone. 

The old people were up to all sorts of 
tricks to impose upon my charity, and get 
some favour out of me. They were far too old 



58 



A Georgia Plantation. 



and infirm to work for me, but once let them 
get a bit of ground of their own given to them, 
and they became quite young and strong 
again. One old woman, called Charity, who 
represented herself as unable to move, and 
entirely dependent on my goodness for food 
&c, I found was in the habit of walking 
six miles almost every day to take eggs to 

Major D to sell. I was complaining 

once to him of my want of provisions, and 
said, ' I can't even get eggs ; in old times all the 
old women had eggs and chickens to sell, but 
they none of them seem to have any left.' 
* Why,' said he, ' we get eggs regularly from 
one of your old women, who walks down 
every day or two to us ; Charity her name is.' 
1 Charity ! impossible,' I exclaimed ; 1 she can 
hardly crawl round here from her hut' ' It is 
true though, nevertheless,' said he. So the 
next time Mistress Charity presented herself, 
almost on all fours, and said, ' Do, dear 
missus, give me something for eat,' I said, 
' No, you old humbug, I won't give you one 



A Fresh Start. 



59 



thing more. You know how much I want eggs, 
and yet you never told me you had any, and 

take them off to Major D~ to sell, because 

you think if I know you have eggs to sell I 
won't give you things.' For one moment the 
old wretch was taken aback at being found 
out, and then her ready negro wit came to 
her aid, and she exclaimed with a horrified 
and indignant air, ' Me sell eggs to me 
dear missus. Neber sell her eggs ; gib dem 
to her.' I need hardly say she had never 
given me one, but after that did sell them to 
me. 

I spent my birthday at the South, and my 
maid telling the people that it was my birth- 
day, they came up in the evening to ' shout 
for me.' A negro must dance and sing, and 
as their religion, which is very strict in such 
matters, forbids secular dancing, they take it 
out in religious exercise, call it ' shouting,' 
and explained to me that the difference 
between the two was, that in their religious 
dancing they did not ' lift the heel' All day 



6o 



A Georgia Plantation. 



they were bringing me little presents of honey, 
eggs, flowers, &c, and in the evening about 
fifty of them, of all sizes and ages and of both 
sexes, headed by old Uncle John, the preacher, 
collected in front of the house to 'shout' First 
they lit two huge fires of blazing pine logs, 
around which they began to move with a slow 
shuffling step, singing a hymn beginning ' I 
wants to climb up Jacob's ladder.' Getting 
warmed up by degrees, they went faster 
and faster, shouting louder and louder, until 
they looked like a parcel of mad fiends. The 
children, finding themselves kicked over in 
the general melde, formed a circle on their own 
account, and went round like small Catherine 
wheels. 

When, after nearly an hour's performance, 
I went down to thank them, and to stop them 
—for it was getting dreadful, and I thought 
some of them would have fits — I found it no 
easy matter to do so, they were so excited. 
One of them, rushing up to my father, seized 
him by the hand, exclaiming, ' Massa, when 



A Fresh Start. 



61 



your birthday ? We must " shout " for you/ 
' Oh, Tony,' said my father, ' my birthday is 
long passed.' Upon which the excited Tony 

turned to Major D , who with Mr. G 

had been dining with us, and said, ' Well den, 
Massa Charlie, when yours ?' I told him finally 
it was Miss Sarah's birthday as well as mine. 
On hearing this he turned to the people, say- 
ing, ' Children, hear de'y (hear do you), dis 
Miss Sarah's birthday too. You must shout 
so loud Miss Sarah hear you all de way to de 
North ! ' At which off they went again, harder 
than ever. Dear old Uncle John came up to 
me, and taking my hands in his, said, ' God 
bless you, missus, my dear missus.' My father, 
who was standing near, put his arm round 
the old man's shoulders, and said, ' You have 
seen five generations of us now, John, haven't 
you ? ' ' Yes, massa,' said John, ' Miss Sarah's 
little boy be de fifth ; bless de Lord.' Both 

Major D and Mr. G spoke of this 

afterwards, saying ' How fond your father is of 
the people.' ' Yes,' said I, ' this is a relation- 



r 



62 A Georgia Plantation. 

ship you Northern people can't understand, 
and will soon destroy.' 

I remained on St. Simon's Island this 
summer until the end of July, enjoying every 
moment of my time. The climate was perfect, 
and I had a delightful Southern-bred mare, 
on which I used to take long rides every day. 
My father had seen her running about the 
streets of Darien, and thought her so hand- 
some he had bought her from the man who 
professed to own her. She was afterwards 
claimed by a gentleman from Virginia, who 
said she was a sister of Planet's, and had been 
raised on his brother's plantation. When the 
war ended he had gone to Texas, leaving her 
with a friend out of whose stable she had 
been stolen by a deserter from the 12th Maine 
Regiment, who sold her to the man from 
whom my father bought her. The story, which 
was proved to be quite true, nearly cost me 
my mare, who was the dearest and most 
intelligent horse I ever had, and who grew to 
know me so well that she would follow me 



A Fresh Start. 63 

about like a dog, and come from the furthest 
end of her pasture when she heard my voice, 
but fortunately the owner at last agreed to a 
compromise, and I kept my beauty. 

Twice a week I rode nine miles to 
Frederika, our post town, to get and take our 
letters, and often, with a little bundle of clothes 
strapped on behind my saddle, I rode down 
twelve miles to the south end of the island, 
and spent the night with my dear friends the 

K 's, returning the next morning before 

the heat of the day. There was a good shell 
road the whole twelve miles, and six of it at 
least ran through a beautiful wood of pines and 
live oak, with an undergrowth of the pictu- 
resque dwarf palmetto and sweet-smelling 
bay . In many places the trees met overhead, 
through which the sun broke in showers of 
gold, lighting up the red trunks of the pines 
and soft green underneath, while the grey 
moss floated silently overhead like a gossamer 
veil, covering the whole. I never met a human 
being, nor heard a sound save the notes of 



r 



64 A Georgia Plantation. 

the different birds, and the soft murmur of 
the wind through the tall pines, which came 
to me laden with their fragrant aroma, mingled 
with the sweet salt breeze from the sea. 

I have often thought since, that it was 
really hardly safe for me to ride about alone, 
or indeed live alone, as I did half the week ; 
but I believe there was less danger in doing 
so then, than there would be now. The 
serpent had not entered into my paradise. 

One day I went on a deer hunt with some 
of the gentlemen, quite as much in hopes of 
getting some venison as of seeing any real 
sport. My diet of ham, eggs, fish, rice, 
hominy, to which latterly, endless water- 
melons had been added, had become almost 
intolerable to me, and I absolutely longed for 
animal food. The morning was perfect and I 
was very much excited, although I did not 
see any deer. They shot one, however, and 
generously gave me half. We were to have 
gone again, but the weather got warm and 
the rattlesnakes came out, so it was not safe. 



A Fresh Start, 65 

My neighbours the H— 's were great 

sportsmen, and had before the war a famous 
pack of hounds, of which a story is told that, 
after chasing a deer all one day and across 
two rivers, the gentlemen returned home 
worn out, and without either deer or hounds. 
After waiting for two weeks for the return of 
the dogs, they went out to look for them, and 
on a neighbouring island found the skeletons 
of their hounds, in a circle round the skeleton 
of a deer. Fortunately, one or two of this 
breed had been left behind, and they were 
still hunting with them, and after our first 
hunt often sent me presents of venison, 
which were most acceptable. 

But while my summer was gliding away 
in such peace and happiness, things outside 
were growing more and more disturbed, and 
my father from time to time brought me news 
of political disturbances, and a general grow- 
ing restlessness among the negroes, which he 
feared would end in great trouble and destroy 
their usefulness as labourers. Our properties 

F 



66 



A Georgia Plantation. 



in such a case would have become worthless. 
White labour could be used on these sea 
islands, but never on the rice fields, which 
if we lost our negro labourers would have 
to be abandoned. A letter written at that 
time shows how different reports reached and 
affected us then, and also the condition our 
part of the South was in, the truth of which 
never has been known. 

St. Simon's Island : June 23, 1867. 

Dearest S , We are, I am afraid, going 

to have terrible trouble by-and-by with 
the negroes, and I see nothing but gloomy 
prospects for us ahead. The unlimited power 
that the war has put into the hands of the 
present Government at Washington seems to 
have turned the heads of the party now in 
office, and they don't know where to stop. 
The whole South is settled and quiet, and 
the people too ruined and crushed to do any- 
thing against the Government, even if they 
felt so inclined, and all are returning to their 



A Fresh Start. 



67 



former peaceful pursuits, trying to rebuild 
their fortunes, and thinking of nothing else. 
Yet the treatment we receive from the Govern- 
ment becomes more and more severe every- 
day, the last act being to divide the whole 
South into five military districts, putting each 
under the command of a United States 
General, doing away with all civil courts and 

law. Even D , who you know is a 

Northern republican, says it is most unjustifi- 
able, not being in any way authorised by the 
existing state of things, which he confesses he 
finds very different from what he expected 
before he came. If they would frankly say 
they intend to keep us down, it would be 
fairer than making a pretence of readmitting 
us to equal rights, and then trumping up 
stories of violence to give a show of justice 
to treating us as the conquered foes of the 
most despotic Government on earth, and by 
exciting the negroes to every kind of insolent 
lawlessness, to goad the people into acts of 
rebellion and resistance. 



68 



A Georgia Plantation. 



The other day in Charleston, which is 
under the command of that respectable 
creature General S — ■ — , they had a fire- 
men's parade, and took the occasion to hoist 
a United States flag, to which this modern 
Gesler insisted on everyone raising his cap 
as he passed underneath. And by a hundred 
other such petty tyrannies are the people, 
bruised and sore, being roused to despera- 
tion ; and had this been done directly after 
the war it would have been bad enough, but 
it was done the other day, three years after 
the close of the war. 

The true reason is the desire and inten- 
tion of the Government to control the elections 
of the South, which under the constitution of 
the country they could not legally do. So they 
have determined to make an excuse for set- 
ting aside the laws, and in order to accomplish 
this more fully, each commander in his 
separate district has issued an order declaring 
that unless a man can take an oath that he 
had not voluntarily borne arms against the 



A Fresh Start. 



69 



United States Government, nor in any way 
aided or abetted the rebellion, he cannot 
vote. This simply disqualifies every white 
man at the South from voting, disfranchising 
the whole white population, while the negroes 
are allowed to vote en masse. 

This is particularly unjust, as the question 
of negro voting was introduced and passed in 
Congress as an amendment to the constitu- 
tion, but in order to become a law a majority 
of two-thirds of the State Legislatures must 
ratify it, and so to them it was submitted, 
and rejected by all the Northern States with 
two exceptions, where the number of negro 
voters would be so small as to be harmless. 
Our Legislatures are not allowed to meet, but 
this law, which the North has rejected, is to be 
forced upon us, whose very heart it pierces 
and prosperity it kills. Meanwhile, in order to 
prepare the negroes to vote properly, stump 
speakers from the North are going all through 
the South, holding political meetings for the 
negroes, saying things like this to them : 1 My 



yo A Georgia Plantation, 

friends, you will have your rights, won't you ? ' 
(' Yes,' from the negroes.) 1 Shall I not go 
back to Massachusetts and tell your brothers 
there that you are going to ride in the street 
cars with white ladies if you please ? 5 (* Yes, 
yes/ from the crowd.) ' That if you pay your 
money to go to the theatre you will sit where 
you please, in the best boxes if you like ? J 
(' Yes,' and applause.) This I copy verbatim 
from a speech made at Richmond the other 
day, since which there have been two serious 
negro riots there, and the General command- 
ing had to call out the military to suppress 
them. 

These men are making a tour through 
the South, speaking in the same way to the 
negroes everywhere. Do you wonder we 
are frightened ? I have been so forcibly 
struck lately while reading Bakers ' Travels 
in Africa,' and some of Du Chaillu s lectures, 
at finding how exactly the same characteristics 
show themselves among the negroes there, in 
their own native country, where no outside 



A Fresh Start. 



influences have ever affected them, as with 
ours here. Forced to work, they improve and 
are useful ; left to themselves they become 
idle and useless, and never improve. Hard 
ethnological facts for the abolitionists to 
swallow, but facts nevertheless. 

It seems foolish to fill my letter to you 
with such matters, but all this comes home to 
us with such vital force that it is hard to 
write, or speak, or think of anything else, 
and the one subject that Southerners discuss 
whenever they meet is, ' What is to become 
of us ? ' 

Affectionately yours, 

F 

I left the South for the North late in July, 
after a severe attack of fever brought on by 
my own imprudence. Just before I left an 
old negro died, named Carolina, one hundred 
years old. He had been my great grand- 
fathers body servant, and my father was 
much attached to him, and sat up with him 



72 A Georgia Plantation. 

the night before he died, giving him extract 
of beef-tea every hour. My sister had sent 
us down two little jars as an experiment, and 
although it did not save poor old Carolina's 
life, I am sure it did mine, as it was the only 
nourishment I could get in the shape of 
animal food after my fever. When Carolina 
was buried in the beautiful and picturesque 
bit of land set apart for the negro burying- 
ground on the island, my father had a tomb- 
stone with the following inscription on it 
erected over him. 

CAROLINA, 

DIED JUNE 26, l866, 

AGED IOO YEARS. 

A long life, marked by devotion to his Heavenly Father and 
fidelity to his earthly masters. 



73 



CHAPTER III. 
1867-1868. 

ALONE. 

In August of 1867 my father died, and as 
soon after as I was able I went down to the 
South to carry on his work, and to look after 
the negroes, who loved him so dearly and 
to whom he was so much attached. My 
brother-in-law went with me, and we reached 
Butler's Island in November. The people 
were indeed like sheep without a shepherd, 
and seemed dazed. 

We had engaged a gentleman as overseer 
in Savannah, and appointed another our 
financial agent for the coming year, and 
besides this all my father's affairs were in the 
hands of an executor appointed by the Court 



74 A Georgia Plantation. 

to settle his estate, but before anything else 
could be done the negroes had to be settled 
with for the past two years, and their share 
of the crops divided according to the amount 
due to each man. My father had given each 
negro a little pass-book, in which had been 
entered from time to time the food, clothing, 
and money which each had received from 
him on account. Of these little books there 
were over three hundred, which represented 
their debits ; then there was the large planta- 
tion ledger, in which an account of the work 
each man had, or had not, done every day 
for nearly two years, had been entered, 
which represented their credits. To the 
task of balancing these two accounts I set 
myself, wishing to feel sure that it was fairly 
done, and also because I knew the negroes 
would be more satisfied with my settle- 
ment. 

Night after night, when the day's work 
was over, I sat up till two and three o'clock in 
the morning, going over and over the long 



Alone. 75 

line of figures, and by degrees got them pretty 
straight. I might have saved myself the 
trouble. Not one negro understood it a bit, 
but all were quite convinced they had been 
cheated, most of them thinking that each man 
was entitled to half the crop. I was so 
anxious they should understand and see they 
had been fairly dealt with, that I went over 
and over again each man's account with him, 
and would begin, 'Well, Jack (or Quash, or 
Nero, as the case might be), you got on such 
a date ten yards of homespun from your 
master.' ' Yes, missus, massa gave me dat.' 
' Then on such and such a day you had ten 
dollars.' ' Yes, missus, dat so.' And so on 
to the end of their debits, all of which they 
acknowledged as just at once. (I have 
thought since they were not clever enough to 
conceive the idea of disputing that part of 
the business.) When all these items were 
named and agreed to, I read the total 
amount, and then turned to the work account. 
And here the trouble began, every man insist- 



r 



1 



76 A Georgia Plantation. 

ing upon it that he had not missed one day 
in the whole two years, and had done full 
work each day. So after endless discussions, 
which always ended just where they began, I 
paid them the money due to them, which 
was always received with the same remark, 
' Well, well, work for massa two whole years, 
and only get dis much.' Finding that their 
faith in my father's justice never wavered, I 
repeated and repeated and repeated, 4 But I 
am paying you from your master's own books 
and accounts.' But the answer was always 
the same, ' No, no, missus, massa not treat 
us so.' Neither, oddly enough, did they seem 
to think I wished to cheat them, but that I 
was powerless to help matters, one man say- 
ing to me one day, ' You see, missus, a woman 
ain't much 'count.' I learnt very soon how 
useless all attempts at ' making them sensible' 
(as they themselves express it) were, and 
after a time, used to pay them their wages 
and tell them to be off, without allowing any 
of the lengthy arguments and discourses over 



Alone. 77 

their payments they wished to indulge in, 
often more, I think, with an idea of asserting 
their independence and dignity, than from 
any real belief that they were not properly 
paid. 

Their love for, and belief in my father, 
was beyond expression, and made me love 
them more than I can say. They never spoke 
of him without some touching and affection- 
ate expression that comforted me far more 
than words uttered by educated lips could 
have done. One old woman said, 1 Missus, 
dey tell me dat at de North people have to 
pay to get buried. Massa pay no money 
here ; his own people nurse him, his own 
people bury him, and his own people grieve 
for him.' Another put some flowers in a 
tumbler by the grave; and another basin, 
water, and towels, saying, ' If massa s spirit 
come, I want him see dat old Nanny not 
forget how he call every morning for water 
for wash his hands ; ' and several of them used 
the expression in speaking of his death, ' Oh, 



78 A Georgia Plantation. 

missus, our back jest broke.' No wonder I 
loved them. 

Their religion, although so mixed up 
with superstition, was very real, and many 
were the words of comfort I got from them. 
One day, when I was crying, an old woman 
put her arms round me and said, ' Missus, 
don't cry ; it vex de Lord. I had tirteen 
children, and I ain't got one left to put 
even a coal in my pipe, and if I did not 
trust de Lord Jesus, what would become of 
me ? ' 

I am sorry to say, however, that finding 
my intention was to alter nothing that my 
father had arranged, some of them tried to 
take advantage of it, one man assuring me 
his master had given him a grove of orange 
trees, another several acres of land, and so 
on, always embellished with a story of his 
own long and useful services, for which ' Massa 
say, Boy, I gib you dis for your own.' 

Notwithstanding their dissatisfaction at 
the settlement, six thousand dollars was paid 



Alone. 



79 



out among them, many getting as much as 
two or three hundred apiece. The result 
was that a number of them left me and 
bought land of their own, and at one time 
it seemed doubtful if I should have hands 
at all left to work. The land they bought, 
and paid forty, fifty dollars and even more 
for an acre, was either within the town limits, 
for which they got no titles, and from which 
they were soon turned off, or out in the pine 
woods, where the land was so poor they could 
not raise a peck of corn to the acre. These 
lands were sold to them by a common class 
of men, principally small shopkeepers and 
Jews (the gentlemen refusing to sell their 
land to the negroes, although they occasion- 
ally rented it to them), and most frightfully 
cheated the poor people were. But they had 
got their land, and were building their little 
log cabins on it, fully believing that they 
were to live on their property and incomes 
the rest of their lives, like gentlemen. 

The baneful leaven of politics had begun 



So A Georgia Plantation. 

working among them, brought to the South 
by the lowest set of blackguards who ever 
undertook the trade, making patriotism in 
truth the ' last refuge of a scoundrel,' as Dr. 
Johnson facetiously defines it, and themselves 
* factious disturbers of the Government,' 
according to his equally pleasant definition 
of a patriot. Only in this case they came 
accredited from the Government, and the 
agent of the Freedmen's Bureau was our 
master, one always ready to believe the 
wildest complaints from negroes, and to call 
the whites to account for the same. 

A negro carpenter complained that a 
gentleman owed him fifty dollars for work 
done, so without further inquiry or any trial, 
the agent sent the gentleman word to pay at 
once, or he would have him arrested, the 
sheriff at that time being one of his own 
former slaves. My brother-in-law, who was 
with me this year, for a short time was a 
Northern man and a strong Republican in his 
feelings, this being the first visit he had ever 



Alone. 



81 



paid to the South. But such a high-handed 
proceeding as this astonished him, and he ex- 
pressed much indignation at it, and declared 
he would send an account of it to a Republi- 
can paper in Philadelphia, as the people at the 
North had no idea of the real state of things 
at the South. He had also expressed himself 
surprised and pleased at the courteous recep- 
tion he had received, although known to be a 
Northerner, and also at the quietness of the 
country generally. I told him they would 
not publish his letter in the Philadelphia 
paper, and I was right, they did not. 

A rather amusing incident occurred while 
he was with me. Having been in quiet 
possession of our property on St. Simon's 
Island for two years, we were suddenly 
notified one day, I never quite knew by 
whom, and in those days it was not easy 
always to know who our lawgivers were, 
that St. Simon's Island came under the head 
of abandoned property, being occupied by 
former owners, who, through contempt of 

G 



82 



A Georgia Plantation, 



the Government and President's authority, 
had refused to make application for its restor- 
ation under the law. ' Therefore,' so ran the 
order, ' such property shall be confiscated 
on the first day of January next, unless 
before that date the owners present them- 
selves before the authorities (?), take the 
required oath of allegiance to the Govern- 
ment, and ask for its restoration/ This 
nothing would induce me to do, the 
whole thing was so preposterous, but 
my brother-in-law decided that under the 
circumstances it was better to obey. So he, a 
strong Republican, who had first voted for 
Lincoln and then for Grant, had never been 
at the South before in his life, and during the 
war had done all in his power to aid and 
support the Northern Government, even 
gallantly offering his services to his country 
when Pennsylvania was threatened by 
General Lee before the battle of Gettys- 
burgh, had to go and take the oath of alle- 
giance to the United States Government on 



Alone. 83 

behalf of his wife's property, she also having 
always sympathised with the Northern cause, 
and having been so bitter in her feelings at 
first as to refuse to receive a Southerner in 
her house. 

What a farce it was ! My brother-in-law 
could not help being amused, it was such an 
absurd position to find himself in, and he 
declared it all came of ever putting his foot 
in this miserable Southern country at all, and 
he had no doubt the result would be that on 
his return to the North he would find all his 
Northern property confiscated, and be hung 
as a rebel. He soon after left me, and then 
my real troubles began. It seemed quite 
hopeless ever to get the negroes to settle 
down to steady work, and although they 
still professed the greatest affection for and 
faith in me, it certainly did not show itself 
in works. My new agent assured me that 
there must be a contract made and signed 
with the negroes, binding them for a year, in 
order to have any hold upon them at all, and 



8 4 



A Georgia Plantation. 



I am not sure that the Freedmen s Bureau 
agent did not require such an agreement to 
be drawn up and submitted to him for 
approval before having it signed. Whether 
they were right or not as regarded the hold 
it gave us over the labourers I cannot say. 
I think possibly it impressed them a little 
more with the sense of their obligations, but 
after having two of them run off in spite of 
the solemnity of the contract, and having to 
pay something like twenty dollars to the 
authorities to fetch them back, we didn't 
trouble ourselves much about enforcing it 
after that. At first the negroes flatly refused 
to sign any contract at all, having been 
advised by some of their Northern friends 
not to do so, as it would put them back to 
their former condition of slavery, and my 
agents were quite powerless to make them 
come to any terms. So I determined to try 
what my personal influence would accom- 
plish. 

The day before I was to have my inter- 



Alone. 85 

view with the Butler's Island people, I 
received a most cheerful note from Major 
D — — , saying that he had paid off all the 
hands at St. Simon's, who seemed perfectly 
satisfied, and were quite willing to contract 
again for another year. I felt a little sur- 
prised at this, as it is not the negro's nature 
to be satisfied with anything but plenty to 
eat and idleness, but was rejoicing over the 
news, when I was summoned to the office 
to see six of the Hampton Point people who 
had just arrived from St. Simon's. There they 
were, one and all with exactly the same story 
as the people here, reserved for my benefit as 
their proper mistress and protector ; ' that 
they had not received full credit for their 
day's work, had been underpaid and over- 
charged,' &c. &c, winding up with, ' Missus, 
de people wait to see you down dere, and dey 
won't sign de contract till you come.' ' But,' 
said I, in despair, ' I can't possibly leave here 
for a week at least, and the work must 
begin there at once, or we shall get in no crop 



86 



A Georgia Plantation. 



this year.' But in vain ; they merely said, 
* We wait, missus, till you come.' ' Very well,' 
I said, ' I'll go to-morrow. Only, mind you 
are all there, for I must be back here the next 
day to have this contract signed.' 

The next morning, at a little after seven, 
I started for St. Simon's in my small boat, 
rowed by my two favourite men, reaching 

there about ten, and taking Major D ■ 

utterly by surprise, as he knew nothing of 
what had happened. From the way the 
negroes spoke the day before, one would 
have supposed the mere sight of my face 
would have done ; but not one signed the 
contract without a long argument on the 
subject, most of them refusing to sign at all, 
though they all assured me they wished to 
work for me as long ' as de Lord spared 
dem.' I knew, however, too well, that this^ 
simply meant that they were willing to con- 
tinue to live on St. Simon's as long as the 
Lord spared them, but not to work, so I was 
firm, and said, ' No, you must sign or go 



Alone. 



87 



away.' So one by one, with groans and 
sighs, they put their marks down opposite 
to their names, and by five I had them all in. 
At nine o'clock, on the first of the flood tide, 
I started back, reaching Butler's Island at 
midnight, nearly frozen, but found my maid, 
who really was everything to me that year, 
waiting for me with a blazing fire and hot tea 
ready to warm me. 

The next morning at ten, I had the big 
mill bell rung to summon the people here to 
sign the contract, and then my work began 
in earnest. For six mortal hours I sat in the 
office without once leaving my chair, while 
the people poured in and poured out, each 
one with long explanations, objections, and 
demonstrations. I saw that even those 
who came fully intending to sign would have 
their say, so after interrupting one man and 
having him say gravely, 4 'Top, missus, don't 
cut my discourse, 5 I sat in a state of dogged 
patience and let everyone have his talk out, 
reading the contract over and over again as 



88 A Georgia Plantation, 

each one asked for it, answering their many- 
questions and meeting their many objections 
as best I could. One wanted this altered 
in the contract, and another that. One was 
willing- to work in the mill but not in the 
field. Several would not agree to sign un- 
less I promised to give them the whole 
of Saturday for a holiday. Others, like the 
St. Simon's people, would ' work for me till 
they died,' but would put their hand to no 
paper. And so it went on all day, each one 
? making me sensible,' as he called it. 

But I was immovable. i No, they must 
sign the contract as it stood.' ' No, I could 
not have anyone work without signing.' * No, 
they must work six days and rest on Sunday/ 
&c, &c. Till at last, six o'clock in the 
evening came and I closed the books with 
sixty-two names down, which was a good 
deal of a triumph, as my agent told me he 
feared none would sign the contract, they 
were so dissatisfied with last year's settle- 
ment. Even old Henry, one of the captains, 



Alone. 



89 



and my chief friend and supporter, said in 
the morning, ' Missus, I bery sorriful, for half 
de people is going to leave.' * Oh no, they 
won't, Henry,' said I. But I thought sixty- 
two the first day, good work, though I had 
a violent attack of hysterics afterwards, from 
fatigue and excitement. Only once did I 
lose my temper and self-control, and that was 
when one man, after showing decided signs 
of insolence, said, ' Well, you sign my paper 
first, and then I'll sign yours.' ' No,' I 
replied in a rage, ' I'll neither sign yours nor 
you mine. Go out of the room and off the 
place instantly.' But I soon saw how foolish 
I was, for looking up five minutes after, I 
beheld the same man standing against the 
door with a broad grin on his face, who, 
when I looked at him in perfect astonishment, 
said with the most perfect good nature, ' I'se 
come back to sign, missus.' 

The next day, Sunday, I tried to keep 
clear of the people, both for rest and because 
I wanted to make some arrangements for my 



90 



A Georgia Plantation. 



school, the young teacher having arrived on 
Friday. 

Monday morning the bell again rang, and 
though I did not see more than twenty-five 
people, I was again in the office from ten a.m. 
to six p.m., and found it far more unpleasant 
than on Saturday, as I had several trouble- 
some, bad fellows to deal with. One man, 
who proposed leaving the place without pay- 
ing his debts, informed me, when I told him he 
must pay first, ' he'd see if he hadn't a law as 
well as I ; ' and another positively refused to 
work or leave the place, so he had to be 
informed that if he was not gone in three 
days he would be put off, which had such an 
effect that he came the next day and signed, 
and worked well afterwards. 

Tuesday and Wednesday my stragglers 
came dropping in, the last man arriving under 
a large cotton umbrella, very defiant that he 
would not sign unless he could have Satur- 
day for a holiday. ' Five days I'll work, but 
(with a flourish of the umbrella) I works 



Alone. 



9i 



for no man on Saturday.' ' Then,' said I, 
1 William, I am sorry, but you can't work for 
me, for any man who works for me must 
work on Saturday.' ' Good morning, den, 
missus,' says my man, with another flourish 
of the umbrella, and departs. About an hour 
afterwards he returned, much subdued, with 
the umbrella shut, which I thought a good 
sign, and informed me that after 4 much 
consideration wid himself,' he had returned 
to sign. So that ended it, and only two men 
really went — one from imagined ill-health, 
and one I dismissed for insubordination. 
The gentlemen seemed to think I had done 
wonders, and I was rather astonished at 
myself, but nothing would ever induce me to 
do such a thing: again. 

o o 

The backbone of the opposition thus 
broken, and the work started more or less 
steadily, I turned my thoughts to what I 
considered my principal work, and belonging 
more to my sphere than what I had been 
engaged in up to that time. I was anxious 



92 



A Georgia Plantation. 



to have the negroes' houses, which were 
terribly dilapidated, repaired and white- 
washed, a school opened, and the old hospital 
building repaired and put in order for the 
following purposes. One of the four big 
rooms the people had taken possession of 
for a church, the old one being some three 
miles distant, at one of the upper settlements, 
and this I determined to let them keep, and 
to use one of the others for the school ; one 
for the old women who couldn't work, and 
the other for the young married women to 
be confined in, as, since the war, they bring 
their children into the world anyhow and 
anywhere, in their little cabins, where men, 
women, and children run in and out indis- 
criminately, so that it is both wretched and 
improper. 

The people did not seem to like either 
of my proposals too much ; especially the old 
plantation midwife, who is indignant at her 
work being taken away from her. But a's I 
find she now makes the charge of five dollars 



Alone. 



93 



for each case, the negroes naturally decline 
employing her on their own account. I hoped 
by degrees to bring them to approve of my 
arrangements, by showing them how much 
more comfortable they would be in my 
hospital, and by presenting the babies born 
there with some clothes, and the old women 
who lived there with blankets, to make 
them like it. (I never did succeed, how- 
ever, and after several attempts, had to give 
it up.) 

I had one or two pupils at the same time, 
and found the greatest difference between 
the genuine full-blooded African and the 
mulattoes. The first, although learning to 
repeat quickly, like a clever parrot, did 
not really take in an idea, while the other 
was as intelligent as possible. I felt sure 
then, and still think, the pure negro incapable 
of advancement to any degree that would 
enable him to cope with the white race, in- 
tellectually, morally, or even physically. My 
white maid took infinite pains to show them 



94 



A Georgia Plantation. 



the best, quickest, as well as simplest way of 
doing the house-work, absolutely taking their 
breath away by the way she worked herself, 
but without much effect, as the instant her 
back was turned they went back to their old 
lazy, slipshod ways of doing things. Her 
efforts to make them tidy in their dress were 
very amusing, and one morning, finding my 
young housemaid working with her sun- 
bonnet on, I said, ' Why do you keep your 
bonnet on, Christine ? ' Upon which, without 
any reply, she pulled the said bonnet down 
over her eyes, and my maid informed me 
she had come to work in the morning with- 
out brushing her hair, so for punishment had 
to wear her sun-bonnet. The women showed 
a strong inclination to give up wearing their 
pretty, picturesque head handkerchiefs, ' be- 
cause white people didn't/ but I was very 
strict about the house servants never coming 
without one on, for their black woolly heads 
did look too ugly without their usual cover- 
ing, which in itself was so handsome, and 



Alone. 95 

gave them so much style, and in some cases 
beauty. 

A few days after the contract was signed 
I started the school, which I hoped would 
be a success. The teacher was a young 
country lad just fresh from college ; clever 
enough, but very conceited, with no more 
manners than a young bear, which, however, 
I hoped he might learn in time from the 
negroes in return for some book learning, 
as they generally are singularly gentle and 
courteous in their manners. I had school 
in the morning for the children, and in the 
evening for the young people who worked 
in the fields. This is decidedly the most 
popular, and we have over fifty scholars, 
some of them quite old men — much too old 
to learn, and much in the way of the younger 
ones, but so zealous that I could not bear to 
turn them away. 

Besides teaching school, my young man 
was to take charge of the store, which I 
found too much for me. My father's object in 



9 6 



A Georgia Plantation. 



opening the store was to give the negroes 
good things at cost price, in order to save 
them from paying three times the price 
for most inferior goods in Darien, where a 
number of small shops had been opened. 
But we did not take into consideration the 
heavy loss it must entail upon us not to put 
even profit enough on the things to cover 
our own expenses, and we sold them to the 
negroes at exactly what we paid for them in 
Philadelphia, bearing all the cost of transpor- 
tation and spoilt goods, so that at the end of 
the following year I found the store just three 
thousand dollars out of pocket, and so decided 
to shut it up, especially as I found that, not- 
withstanding our giving the negroes the very 
best things at cost price, they much preferred 
going to Darien to spend their money on 
inferior goods and at greatly increased rates. 
I suppose, poor people, it was natural they 
should like to swagger a little, and spend 
their newly, but certainly not hardly-earned 
money freely, and it was an immense relief 



Alone. 



97 



to my pocket and labours to give up shop- 
keeping, although we only had it open for 
about two hours every afternoon. 

But all this time, while we were getting 
things more and more settled on the place, the 
troubles from outside were drawing nearer and 
nearer as the day for voting approached, and in 
March burst upon us in the shape of political 
meetings and excitement of all kinds. Two 
or three Northern political agents arrived 
in Darien, and summoned all the negroes 
to attend meetings, threatening them with 
various punishments if they stayed away. 
I in vain reasoned with the negroes, and did 
all in my power to prevent their attending 
these meetings, and told them no one could 
punish them for not going : not because I 
cared in the least which way they voted, but 
because it interfered so terribly with their 
work. I doubled the watchmen at night, and 
did all I could to prevent strangers land- 
ing on the Island ; but one morning found 
that during the night a notice had been put 

H 



98 A Georgia Plantation. 

up on the wharf, calling upon all the people 
to attend a political meeting on pain of being 
fined five hundred dollars, or exiled to a 
foreign land. As the meeting was some way 
off, and the election followed in a few days, 
I knew that if the people once broke off, no 
more work would be done for at least a week, 
and this was just the time one of our plant- 
ings had to be put in, which, as we can only 
do it on the spring tides, would have cost 
me just two hundred acres of rice. So I 
argued and threatened, and told them it was 
all rubbish — no one could either exile or 
fine them, and that they must not go to the 
meeting at all, and when the day for voting 
came must do all their day's work first and 
vote afterwards ; which they easily could 
have done, having always finished their day's 
work by three o'clock, and the voting place 
not being half a mile off. 

It was useless, however. My words were 
powerless, the negroes naturally thinking 
that the people who had freed them could 



Political Difficulties. 99 

do anything they liked, and must be obeyed ; 
so they not only prepared to go to the meet- 
ing, but, I knew, would not do a stroke of 
work on the voting days. At last, in despair, 
I wrote to General Meade, who was then 
the military commander of our district, and 
a personal acquaintance of mine, to tell him 
what was going on, and ask him if it was 
impossible that the planters should be pro- 
tected from these political disturbers and 
agitators. I received the following answer 
and order from him almost immediately : — 

Head-quarters, Third Military District. 
(Department of Georgia, Florida, and Alabama.) 

Atlanta, Georgia : April 11, 1868. 

My dear Miss B , — I have to ac- 
knowledge the receipt of your letter, reporting 
that certain persons are ordering the labourers 
under your employment to attend political 
meetings, and threatening, in case of refusal, 
to punish them with fines or exile them to a 
foreign country ; and have to state in reply, 
that no interference of any kind with the 

h 2 



ioo A Georgia Plantation. 



just rights of employers is authorised by 
existing laws or orders, and that, on the 
contrary, you will see, from the enclosed 
order, which was being prepared at the time 
your letter was received, that such inter- 
ference is positively prohibited, and is punish- 
able on conviction before a military tribunal 
with fine and imprisonment. If you will 
furnish these Head-quarters with the names 
of parties thus attempting to interfere with 
your rights as an employer, together with 
the names of reliable witnesses, I shall not 
hesitate to investigate the case, and bring 
the offenders to trial and punishment. 

Very respectfully yours, 

George G. Meade, 

Major-General. 

The order was as follows :— 

Head-quarters, Third Military District. 
(Department of Georgia, Florida, and Alabama.) 

General Orders, No. 58. — The uncer- 

» 

tainty which seems to exist in regard to 



Political Difficulties. ioi 

holding municipal elections on the 20th inst., 
and the frequent inquiries addressed to 
these Head-quarters, renders it necessary 
for the commanding General to announce 
that said elections are not authorised by 
any orders from these Head-quarters. 
Managers of elections are hereby prohibited 
from receiving any votes, except such State 
and county offices as are provided for in the 
constitution, to be submitted for ratification, 
the voting for which offices is authorised by 
General Orders, Nos. 51 and 52. 

No. 2. Complaints having been made 
to these Head-quarters, by planters and 
others, that improper means are being used 
to compel labourers to leave their work to 
attend political meetings, and threats being 
made that in case of refusal penalties will be 
attached to said refusal, the Major-General 
Commanding announces that all such attempts 
to control the movements of labourers and 
interfere with the rights of employers are 
strictly forbidden and will be considered, 



102 A Georgia Plantation. 



and, on conviction, will be punished, the 
same as any attempt to dissuade voters from 
going to the polls, as referred to in paragraph 
ii, General Orders, No. 57. 

No. 3. The Major-General Command- 
ing also makes known that, while he ac- 
knowledges, and will require to be respected, 
the right of labourers to peacefully assemble 
at night to discuss political questions, yet he 
discountenances and forbids the assembling 
of armed bodies, and requires that all such 
assemblages shall notify either the civil or 
military authorities of these proposed meet- 
ings, and said military and civil authorities 
are enjoined to see that the right of electors 
to peaceably assemble for legitimate purposes 
is not disturbed. 

No. 4. The wearing or carrying of 
arms, either concealed or otherwise, by 
persons not connected with the military 
service of the Government, or such civil 
officers whose duties under the laws, and 
orders is to preserve the public peace, at or 



Political Difficulties. 103 

in the vicinity of the polling places, on the 
days set apart for holding the election in the 
State of Georgia, is positively forbidden. 
Civil and military officers will see that this 
order, as well as all others relative to the 
preservation of the peace and quiet of the 
counties in which they are acting, is strictly 
observed. 

By order of Major-General Meade, 

R. C. Drum, A.A.G. 

These orders were accompanied by a 
private letter, which was as follows : — 

Easter Sunday : April 11, 1868. 

My dear Miss B — — , — You will see 
by my writing you to-day how much I feel 
flattered by your appeal to me, and how 
ready I am to respond to it. I regret very 
much to learn the state of affairs as de- 
scribed by you ; they are certainly un- 
authorised by any laws or orders from these 
Head-quarters, and, since the receipt of your 
letter I have had prepared an order to cover 



104 A Georgia Plantation. 

such case, and forbidding the interference 
of political agents with the rights of em- 
ployers. I will have a copy sent to you 
officially, which you can make use of to 
correct this evil in future. 

I have been twice in Savannah, on my 
way to Florida ; have both times thought 
of you and inquired after you. If you had 
been a little more accessible, and had I not 
feared to compromise you by a visit from 
the awful military satrap and despot who 

rules so tyrannically over you, Miss W 

will tell you that I, as well as the Colonel 
(my son), were both desirous of visiting you. 
I am very much gratified to learn that you 
acknowledge being my subject, and beg 
you to remember the acknowledgment is re- 
ciprocal, as I acknowledge my allegiance to 
you — an allegiance founded on respect, kindly 
regard, and many pleasant recollections of 
former times. 

Let me assure you I shall be ready at 
all times to aid and encourage you in your 



Political Difficulties. 105 

labours, and that you must not hesitate to 
appeal to me ; for, though many people will 
not believe it, I am trying to act impartially, 
and to do justice to all. 

Very truly and sincerely yours, 

George G. Meade. 

1 

P.S. — Your letter being marked private, 
I have not deemed myself justified in acting 
on it, but you will see from my official letter 
that, if you will send me evidence and names 
of witnesses in Mr. Campbell's case, I will 
attend to that gentleman. Official letter 
goes by to-day's mail with this. Let me 
know if it does not reach you. 

I was, of course, much pleased and very 
triumphant when I received these letters, 
although it was impossible to comply with 
General Meade's request that we would 
report the offenders, as the notices served 
on the negroes were never signed — which 
convinced us of their illegality, but did not 
in the least take away from their importance 



106 A Georgia Plantation. 

to the negroes. Still, I not only read my 
order to them, but had it posted up in 
Darien, and, on the strength of it, repeated 
my previous orders to my negroes that, if 
one of them neglected his work to attend 
political meetings or to vote, I would dismiss 
him from the place ; adding, at the same 
time, ' there is no difficulty about your 
voting after your work is over.' My surprise 
and disgust were therefore extreme when I 
received the following day a second letter 
from General Meade, as follows :— 

Atlanta : April 13, 1868. 

• ~~§~*I? 

My dear Miss Bi— — , — I wrote you 
very hastily yesterday on my return from 
church, not wishing to lose a mail, advising 
you of my views and action. I find to-day, 
on a careful re-perusal of your letter, that you 
are in error in one particular. You seem to 
think you have the right to decide when your 
people shall vote, and that as there is time 
for them after three o'clock, the end of their 
day's work, that you are authorised to pro- 



Political Difficulties. 107 

hibit their leaving at an earlier hour. This 
is not so, and I would advise you not to 
insist on it. The theory of my order is that 
no restraint is to be put on the labourer to 
prevent his voting. 

Now as it is sometimes difficult for a 
person to vote as soon as he reaches the 
polls, some having to wait days for their 
turn, and as, often, examination has to be 
made of the registration books, and the voter 
in addition to the delay of awaiting his turn 
after getting up to the polls, may find some 
error in the spelling of his name or omission 
to put his name on the list, and in conse- 
quence of these obstacles lose his turn to 
have the error corrected and then again take 
his chance, more time must be allowed than 
your rule would admit. I think you will 
have to make up your mind that the election 
will be a great nuisance, and that you will 
not get much out of your people during its 
continuance. If they are reasonable and 
the facilities good at Darien, they should not 



108 A Georgia Plantation. 

require any more time than is absolutely 
necessary, but as I know that voting is a 
work of time, for which reason we give 
four days, I fear these plausible, and perhaps 
actual obstacles, will be taken advantage of 
to spend the time in idleness and frolicking, 
on the plea that ' they could not get a chance 
to vote.' 

I take the liberty of writing this to you 
because my letter of yesterday might lead 
you astray. Again assuring you of my warm 
regard, 

I remain, 

Yours very truly, 

George G. Meade. 

I naturally felt indignant at this letter, 
for I had told General Meade that I did not 
intend to interfere with my negroes voting, 
but only to save myself from loss, and in my 
case no difficulty existed about their reaching 
the polls, which were not a mile from the house. 
And this second letter undid all the good of 



Political Difficulties. 109 



the first, besides which I could not help 
feeling the gross injustice of coolly telling me 
that for four whole days I must not expect 
any work, for it would really just in that 
week have entailed a loss of two hundred 
acres, as I told General Meade in my letter. 
And what Northern farmer or manufacturer 
would have submitted for one moment to an 
order from the Government, directing him to 
give his employes four whole days for voting, 
just at the busiest season ? 

I was both hurt and angry, and never 
have to this day understood this afterthought 
of General Meade. He was always so kind 
and courteous, and had been a personal friend 
of my father, and could not really have dis- 
believed my statements. I suppose that he 
thought in fact I was not my own mistress, 
but acting under orders and advice from my 
Southern neighbours. But I can solemnly 
assert that neither then nor since, to my 
knowledge, have my negroes been influenced 
in their way of voting by the planters, beyond 



no A Georgia Plantation. 



a mere joking remark as to whether they felt 
sure that they had the right ticket, or some 
such thing. I think most of the gentlemen 
felt as I did, that the negroes voting at all 
was such a wicked farce that it only deserved 
our contempt. I do not say that no outside 
influence was ever used afterwards, although 
I do not know of any personally, and cer- 
tainly, no intimidation, as I think I can most 
clearly and satisfactorily prove by a statement 
as to how matters stand with us politically at 
present. From first to last all our political 
disturbances arose from agents belonging to 
the Republican party, mostly Northern ad- 
venturers, of whom, thank God, we are now 
rid. 

After thinking the matter over I deter- 
mined to pay no attention to General Meade's 
second letter, as I felt I was justified in doing 
by the facts of the case. So I put the letter 
in my pocket, and repeated my orders that 
the negroes were to do their work firSt, and 
vote afterwards. 



Political Difficulties. 



hi 



The election day came, and my agent, 
who was not very judicious and was very 
excitable, had me awaked at six o'clock in the 
morning to tell me that there was not a negro 
in the field, all having announced their inten- 
tion of going over to Darien to vote. By ten 
o'clock there was not a man left on the place, 
even the old half-idiot, who took care of the 
cows, having gone to vote with the rest ; and 
my agent, who was much excited over it all, 

said, ' Now, Miss B , what will you do ? 

You can't dismiss the whole plantation.' I 
confess for a moment I felt checkmated, and 
did not know what to do, but as I had in- 
tended to go down to St. Simon's that day I 
determined to carry out my intention, which 
would give me time to think quietly and 
coolly over the situation. So I sent word to 
my two boat hands that they must cast their 
votes as soon as possible and return to take 
me down, an order they promptly obeyed. 
The next day I received a note from my 
agent, saying that the hands had all returned 



ii2 A Georgia Plantation. 

to their work early in the day after voting, 
and had all finished the entire task with the 
exception of two or three, who promised to 
do double work the next day. Here was an 
unexpected triumph, and I truly believe that 
my plantation was almost the only one in the 
whole State of Georgia where any work was 
done during those four days, and apart from 
the actual loss of labour, four days of idleness 
would have made it doubly difficult to get 
the people in hand again. Down on St. 
Simon's their ardour about voting was con- 
siderably cooled by the fact that they had 
twelve miles to walk to the polls, and besides 
had not been visited by any political agents 
to stir them up. So only a few out of the 
whole number went, and we had no trouble 
about it. This ended our political troubles for 
this year, but the work was still anything but 
steady or satisfactory, and hardly a day passed 
without difficulty in some shape or other. 

In a letter written at the end of* April I 
say : — 



Fresh Difficulties. 113 

All winter I have had a sort of feeling that 
before long I should get through and have 
things settled ; but I am beginning to find out 
that there is no getting through here, for just 
as you are about getting through, you have to 
begin all over again. I have had a good 
deal of trouble this last week with my people — 
not serious, but desperately wearisome. They 
are the most extraordinary creatures, and the 
mixture of leniency and severity which it is 
requisite to exercise in order to manage them 
is beyond belief. Each thing is explained 
satisfactorily to them and they go to work. 
Suddenly some one, usually the most stupid, 
starts an idea that perhaps by-and-by they 
may be expected to do a little more work, or 
be deprived of some privilege ; upon which 
the whole field gets in the most excited state, 
they put down their hoes and come up to the 
house for another explanation, which lasts 
till the same thing happens again. 

They are the most effervescent people in 
the world, and to see them in one of their 

I 



ii4 A Georgia Plantation. 

excitements, gesticulating wildly, talking so 
violently that no one on earth can understand 
one word they say, you would suppose they 
never could be brought under control again. 
But go into the field the next morning, 
and there they are, as quiet, peaceable, and 
cheerful as if nothing had happened. At 
first I used to talk too, but now I just stand 
perfectly quiet until they have talked them- 
selves out, and then I ask some simple 
question which shows them how foolish they 
have been, and they cool down in a moment. 

The other day, while I was at dinner, I 
heard tramp, tramp, outside, and a gang of 
fifty arrived, the idea having occurred to 
them that, while I was gone in harvest time, 
they might be overworked. They talked 
and they raved ' that they had contracted to 
do two tasks and no more,' going from one 
imaginary grievance to another, until one man 
suddenly broke out with, ' And, missus, when 
we work night and day, we ought to be 
paid extra.' Upon which they all took it up, 



Fresh Difficulties. i i 5 

' Yes, missus, when we tired with working 
hard all day, den to work all night for nothing 
is too much.' Not having spoken before, I 
then said very quietly, * Have you ever been 
asked to work at night ? ' There was a 
dead pause for a moment, and then one man 
said rather sheepishly, ' No.' ' Well,' said I, 
' when you are, you will certainly be paid 
extra, and now, as you seem to have for- 
gotten the contract, I will read it to you over 
again.' 

So I brought it out and read it slowly 
and solemnly, dwelling particularly on the 
part in which it said, ' The undersigned freed 
men and women agree to obey all orders and 
to do the work required of them in a satis- 
factory manner, and in event of any violation 
of this contract, they are to be dismissed the 
place and to forfeit all wages due to them.' 
This cooled them considerably, and when I 
added, ' Now understand, your work is just 
what you are told to do, and if one bushel 
of rice is lost through your disobedience 

1 2 



u6 A Georgia Plantation. 

or carelessness, you shall pay for it,' this 
quenched them utterly, and they went to 
work the next morning with the greatest 
possible good-will, and all will go on well 
until the next time, whenever that may be. 
But what with troubles without and troubles 
within, life is a burden and rice a difficult 
crop to raise. 

As for Mr. D s and Mr. W s 

opinions about the glorious future of our Sea 
Island cotton plantations, they are worth just 
as much as the paper on which their calcula- 
tions are made, and are theoretical entirely. 

Mr. G , another rich New York man, 

who figured it all out on paper there, came 
here two years ago to make his fortune, and 
he told me the other day that he was perfectly 
convinced that Sea Island cotton never would 
pay again. Rice, he said, might, but this fine 
cotton, never. The expense and risk of rais- 
ing it was too great, and the price too much 
lowered by foreign competition. The labour 
is too uncertain, and anyone who knows, as I 



Fresh Difficulties. 



117 



do, that after all my hard work the crop 
may be lost at any moment by the negroes 
going off or refusing to work, knows how 
useless it is to count on any returns with 
certainty. Wherever white labour can be 
introduced, other crops will be cultivated, 
and wherever it can't, the land will remain 
uncultivated. 

Rice lands now rent at ten dollars an 
acre, and cotton from two to three, so you can 
judge what the people here think about it ; 
and, after all, I suppose they must know best. 
The orange trees are all in full bloom now, 
and smell most deliciously sweet, and the 
little place looks its prettiest, which is not say- 
ing much for it, it is true. Another year I 
hope to improve it by removing the negro 
houses away from where they now are, close 
to this house, to where I can neither see, hear, 
nor smell them. I shall then run my own 
fence out a little further, taking in a magnifi- 
cent magnolia and some large orange trees, 
which, with the quantities of flowers I have 



n8 A Georgia Plantation. 

set out everywhere, will at any rate make 
the garden round the house pretty. 

A little later on, the Island being sub- 
merged by a sudden overflow and rise of the 
river, I accepted an invitation from some 
friends in South Carolina, also rice-planters, 
to visit them. From there I write as 
follows : — 

Mrs. P.'s family consists of a very nice 
girl about my own age, clever and well- 
educated, and two sons, one about twenty- 
seven and the other about twenty-four, both 
of whom were educated abroad, and are well- 
informed and intelligent. So altogether it is 
a pleasant family to be in, and as we are all 
trying to make our fortunes as rice-planters, 
we have everything in common, and talk 
* rice ' all day. 

I have ridden every day since I have 
been here, and on Friday went deer-hunting, 
which, of course, I enjoyed very much. * We 
started at eight o'clock in the morning, and 



Fresh Difficulties. 119 

did not return till five o'clock in the afternoon, 
having seen six deer and killed two, one of 
which we lost, after a short run, in the river. 

This part of the country has suffered more 
heavily than any other from the war. Hun- 
dreds of acres of rice land, which yielded 
millions before the war, are fast returning to 
the original swamp from which they were 
reclaimed with infinite pains and expense, 
simply because their owners are ruined, their 
houses burnt to the ground, and their negroes 
made worthless as labourers. It is very sad 
to see such wide-spread ruin, and to hear of 
girls well-educated, and brought up with every 
luxury, turned adrift as dressmakers, school- 
teachers, and even shop girls, in order to keep 
themselves and their families from starvation. 

One of Mrs. F 's nieces paddles her old 

father over to the plantation every morning 
herself, and while he is giving his orders in the 
fields, sits on a heap of straw, making under- 
clothes to sell in Charleston. It is wonderful 
to me to see how bravely and cheerfully they 



120 A Georgia Plantation. 

do work, knowing as I do how they lived 
before the war. 

I was agreeably surprised with the beauty 
of this place, for I thought all rice plantations, 
like Butler's Island, were uglv and uninter- 
esting. Here the rice fields are quite out of 
sight. The garden, which is very large, is 
enclosed by a lovely hedge of some sweet- 
smelling shrub and roses ; in it are clematis 
and sweet olea bushes thirty feet high, with 
quantities of violets and all sorts of sweet 
things besides. Then there are three superb 
live oak trees, from under which we look out 
on the river, which runs clear and deep in 
front of the house. The house itself is a good- 
sized building, with remains of great elegance 
about it, and with some nice old family pic- 
tures and china in it. Mrs. P— — is very 
proud of having saved these things, which 
she did by remaining with her daughter in 
the house during a raid, when all her neigh- 
bours fled, leaving their houses to be literally 
emptied of their contents by the soldiers of 



Fresh Difficulties. 



121 



the Northern army who visited this section 
of the country. 

M told me a funny story of a visit 

she received from a tipsy Yankee captain, to 
whom she and her mother were, from in- 
terested motives, most civil, and who became 
so affected by her charms that he presented 
her with a silver pitcher to which he had just 
helped himself from a neighbouring house, 
which she gratefully accepted, and returned 
as soon as possible to its rightful owner. 

I leave here this evening, as my agent 
writes me the waters have subsided from the 
face of the earth. So I must get back to my 
work and to my new planting machine, which I 
am very anxious to try, being the first step to- 
wards freeing ourselves from negro labourers. 

On my return, the season being well ad- 
vanced and the rice place no longer healthy, 
I went down at once to the cotton plantation, 
of which my final letter written from the 
South this year gives this account :• — 



122 



A Georgia Plantation. 



Hampton Point : May 5, 1868. 

I came down here last Tuesday, as, before 
I return to the North I want to get a little 
sea air, as well as to have the house re- 
shingled, the rain now coming through the 
old roof in plentiful showers. The main 
body of the house, I am glad to find, is per- 
fectly good, so that repairing the roof and 
piazzas will put it in thorough order ; and as 
I have brought my whole force of eight 
carpenters down, the work is going briskly 
forward. This place, always lovely, is now 
looking its best, with all the young spring 
greens and flowers lighting up the woods, and 
I long to cut and trim, lay out and take up, 
making the place as beautiful as it is capable of 
being made. It is a great contrast in every 
way to Butler's Island, the place as well as 
people. 

The proximity of the other place to 
Darien has a very demoralising effect upon 
the negroes there. Here everything moves 
on steadily and quietly, as it used to do in old 



Fresh Difficulties. 123 

times. Bram still has charge, and with his 
three nice grown sons, gives the tone to the 
place. We have planted about a hundred 
and twenty-five acres of cotton, all of which 
are coming up well and healthy. But this time 
last year it looked well too, and then, alas ! 
alas ! was totally destroyed by the army- 
worm, so who can tell if it may not again be 
swept from off the face of the earth in a single 
night, as it was last year. 

Your notion, and Miss F 's, that the 

negroes ought at once to be made to realise 
their new condition and position, is an im- 
possibility, and you might just as well expect 
children of ten and eleven to suddenly realise 
their full responsibilities as men and women, 
as these people. That they will come to it 
in time I hope and believe, and for that 
purpose I am having them educated, trying 
to increase their desire for comforts, and 
excite their ambition to furnish their houses 
and make them neat and pretty. But the 
change was too great to expect them to adopt 



124 A Georgia Plantation. 

the new state of things at once, and they 
must come to it by degrees, during which 
time my personal influence is necessary to 
keep them up in their work, and to prevent 
them falling into habits of utter worthlessness, 
from which they can never be reclaimed. 

From the first, the fixed notion in their 
minds has been that liberty meant idleness, 
and they must be forced to work until they 
become intelligent enough to know the value 
of labour. As for starving them into this, 
that is impossible too, for it is a well-known 
fact that you can't starve a negro. At this 
moment there are about a dozen on Butler's 
Island who do no work, consequently get no 
wages and no food, and I see no difference 
whatever in their condition and those who 
get twelve dollars a month and full rations. 
They all raise a little corn and sweet potatoes, 
and with their facilities for catching fish and 
oysters, and shooting wild game, they have 
as much to eat as they want, and now are 
quite satisfied with that, not yet having 



Fresh Difficulties. 125 

learned to want things that money alone can 
give. 

The proof that my theory about personal 
influence is the only means at present by 
which the people can be managed, is that my 
father, by his strong influence over them last 
year, made the best crop that was raised in 
the country, and this year our people are 
working far better than others in the neigh- 
bourhood, and we have again the prospect 
of a large crop, while our neighbours are in 
despair, their hands running off, refusing to 
work, and even in some places raising riots in 
the place. Not that their masters are not 
paying them their wages, for in some cases 
they are giving them more than we do ; but 
because they just - pay them off so much a 
month and trouble their heads no more about 
them, just as if they were white labourers. 
Now, my desire and object is to put them 
on this footing as soon as possible, but they 
must be kept in leading-strings until they are 
able to stand alone. 



126 A Georgia Plantation. 



CHAPTER IV. 
1868-1869. 

RECONSTRUCTION. 

In November of the same year I again 
visited the South, having received during the 
summer one or two sensational telegrams from 
my agent, who was apt to lose his head, and 
although they sounded very alarming, they 
proved to be the creation of a vivid imagina- 
tion or unfounded reports, and on the whole 
the people had done very well, and we had a 
large crop for the acreage planted. This 
year I took a friend with me, and my maid. 
Christmas, politics, and paying-off had again 
upset all the negroes, and many of them said 
they intended to leave the place, and some 



Reconstr uction. 



127 



did. We were now giving 1 2 dollars a month, 
with rations, half the money being paid at the 
end of every month, and the rest, at the end 
of the year. Knowing that it was quite use- 
less to try and get them to settle down until 
after the first of the year, I let them alone 
and devoted myself to the children, for 
whom I had a beautiful Christmas tree. I 
wrote on Christmas evening an account of 
it all. 

Christmas 1868. 

Dearest M , You have heard of our 

safe arrival, and how much more comfortable 
the travelling was than last year. We arrived 
about a month ago, and I have been hard at 
work ever since. The negroes do not seem 
to be in a very satisfactory condition, but it is 
owing in a great measure, I think, to its being 
Christmas time. They are all prepared again 
to make their own, and different, terms for 
next year, but except for the bother and 
trouble I don't feel very anxious about it, 
for we have a gang of Irishmen doing the 



128 



A Georgia Plantation. 



banking and ditching, which the negroes 
utterly refuse to do any more at all, and 
therefore, until the planting begins, we can 
do without the ne^ro labour.) 

Last year they humbugged me completely 
by their expressions of affection and desire to 
work for me, but now that the novelty of 
their getting back once more to their old 
home has entirely worn off and they have 
lost their old habits of work, the effects of 
freedom are beginning to tell, and everywhere 
sullen unwillingness to work is visible, and all 
round us people are discussing how to get 
other labourers in the place of negroes. But 
alas ! on the rice lands white labour is impos- 
sible, so that I really don't know what we shall 
do, and I think things look very gloomy for 
the planters. Our Northern neighbours on St. 
Simon's, the D — — s, who were most hopeful 
last year, are now perfectly discouraged with 
the difficulties they have to encounter with 
their labour, and of course having to lose two 
or three months every year while the negroes 



Reconstruction. 



129 



are making up their minds whether they will 
work or not, obliges us to plant much less 
ground than we should otherwise do.y How- 
ever, there is no use taking evil on account, 
and when we are ruined will be time enough 
to say free labour here is a failure, and I 
still hope that when their Christmas excite- 
ment is over, the people will settle down to 
work. 

My Christmas tree this afternoon was 
a great success ; it was really very pretty. 
I had three rooms packed full of people, the 
women begging me to give them dolls and 
the toys, which I had brought of course for 
the children alone. The orange trees are a 
miracle of beauty ; many of the branches 
touch the ground from the weight of the 
fruit, and you cannot walk under them with- 
out knocking the oranges with your head. 
Several of the trees have yielded two thou- 
sand, and the whole crop is estimated at 
sixteen thousand. 

We had a small excitement about this 

K 



130 A Georgia Plantation. 

time, owing to a report which went the 
round of the plantations, that there was to be 
a general negro insurrection on the ist of the 
year. I did not much believe it, but as I had 
promised my friends at the North, who were 
very anxious about me, to run no risks and 
to take every precaution against danger, I 
thought it best to seek some means of pro- 
tection. I first asked my friend whether 
she felt nervous and would rather leave 
the Island, but she, being a true soldier's 
daughter, said no, she would stay and take 
her chance with me. We then agreed to say 
nothing about it to my maid, who was a new 
English maid, thinking that if we did not 
mind having otir throats cut, neither need 
she — particularly as she now spent most of 
her time weeping at the horrors which sur- 
rounded her. 

I wrote therefore to our nearest military 
station and asked that a guard of soldiers 
might be sent over for a day or two, which 
was done. But as they came without any 



Reconstruction. 131 

officer, and conducted themselves generally 
disagreeably, stealing the oranges, worrying 
the negroes, and making themselves entirely 
at home even to the point of demanding to 
be fed by me, I packed them off, preferring 
to take my chance with my negroes than 
with my protectors. I don't believe that 
there was the least foundation for the 
report of the insurrection, but we had trouble 
enough the whole winter in one form or 
other. 

The negroes this year and the following 
seemed to reach the climax of lawless in- 
dependence, and I never slept without a 
loaded pistol by my bed. Their whole 
manner was changed ; they took to calling 
their former owners by their last name with- 
out any title before it, constantly spoke of my 

agent as old R , dropped the pleasant 

term of * Mistress,' took to calling me ' Miss 
Fanny,' walked about with guns upon their 
shoulders, worked just as much and when 

they pleased, and tried speaking to me with 

k 2 



132 A Georgia Plantation. 

their hats on, or not touching them to me 
when they passed me on the banks. This 
last rudeness I never permitted for a moment, 
and always said sharply, ' Take your hat off 
instantly/ and was obliged to take a tone 
to them generally which I had never done 
before. One or two, who seemed rather 
more inclined to be insolent than the rest, I 
dismissed, always saying, ' You are free to 
leave the place, but not to stay here and 
behave as you please, for I am free too, and 
moreover own the place, and so have a 
right to give my orders on it, and have them 
obeyed.' 

I felt sure that if I relaxed my discipline 
for one moment all was up, and I never 
could control the negroes or plant the place 
again ; and to this unerring rule I am sure I 
owe my success, although for that year, and 
the two following, I felt the whole time that 
it was touch-and-go whether I or the negroes 
got the upper hand. 

A new trouble came upon us too, or 



Reconstruction. 133 

rather an old trouble in a new shape. Negro 
adventurers from the North, finding that 
politics was such a paying trade at the South, 
began pouring in, and were really worse than 
the whites, for their Southern brethren looked 
upon their advent quite as a proof of a new 
order of things, in which the negroes were to 
rule and possess the land. 

We had a fine specimen in one Mr. Tunis 
Campbell, whose history is rather peculiar. 
Massachusetts had the honour of giving him 
birth, and on his first arrival in Georgia he 
established himself, whether with or without 
permission I know not, on St. Catherine's 
Island, a large island midway between 
Savannah and Darien, which was at that time 
deserted. The owner, without returning, 
rented it to a Northern party, who on coming 
to take possession found Mr. Campbell 
established there, who declined to move, on 
some pretended permission he had from the 
Government to occupy it, and it was neces- 
sary to apply to the authorities at Darien to 



134 -A Georgia Plantation. 

remove him, which was done by sending a 
small armed force. He then came to Darien, 
and very soon became a leader of the negroes, 
over whom he acquired the most absolute 
control, and managed exactly as he pleased, 
so that when the first vote for State and 
county authorities was cast, he had no diffi- 
culty in having himself elected a magistrate, 
and for several years administered justice 
with a high hand and happy disregard of law, 
there being no one to oppose him. 

Happily, he at last went a little too far, 
and arrested the captain of a British vessel, 
which had come to Darien for timber, for 
assault and battery, because he pushed 
Campbell's son out of the way on the deck 
of his own ship. The captain was brought 
before Campbell, tried, and sentenced to pay 
a heavy fine, from which he very naturally 
appealed to the English Consul in Savannah, 
who of course ordered his release at once. 
This and some other equally lawless acts 
by which Mr. Campbell was in the habit of 



Reconstr uction. i 3 5 

filling his own pockets, drew the attention of 
the authorities to him, and a very good young 
judge having just been put on our circuit, he 
was tried for false imprisonment, and sen- 
tenced to one year's imprisonment himself, 
which not only freed us from his iniquitous 
rule, against which we had had no appeal, 
but broke the spell which he held over the 
negroes, who up till the time of his downfall, 
had believed his powers omnipotent, and at 
his instigation had defied all other authority ; 
which state of things had driven the planters 
to despair, for there seemed to be no remedy 
for this evil, the negroes throwing all our 
authority to the wind, and following Campbell 
wherever he chose to lead them. 

So desperate were some of the gentlemen, 
that at one time they entertained the idea of 
seeing if they could not buy Campbell over, 
and induce him by heavy bribes to work for 
us, or rather to use his influence over our 
negroes to make them work for us. And this 
proposition was made to me, but I could not 



136 A Georgia Plantation. 

consent to such a plan. In the first place it 
was utterly opposed to my notions of what 
was right, and my pride revolted from the 
idea of making any such bargain with a crea- 
ture like Campbell ; besides which I felt sure 
it was bad policy, that if we bought him 
one day he would sell us the next. So I re- 
fused to have anything to do with the project, 
and it was fortunately never carried out, for 
although during the next three or four years 
Campbell gave us infinite trouble, he would 
have given us far more had we put ourselves 
in his power by offering him a bribe. 

My agent unfortunately was not much 
assistance to me, being nervous, timid, and 
irresolute. Naturally his first thought was to 
raise the crops by any means that he could, 
but feeling himself powerless to enforce his 
orders, owing^ to the fact that we had no 
proper authorities to appeal to, should our 
negroes misbehave themselves, these repre- 
sentatives of the Government pandering 
to the negroes in every way, in order to 



Re con st r uction. 137 

secure their votes for themselves, he was 
obliged to resort to any means he could, to 
get any work out of the negroes at all, 
often changing his tactics and giving different 
orders from day to day. In vain I implored 
him to be firm, and if he gave an order to 
stand to it ; but the invariable answer was, 

' It's of no use, Miss B , I should only get 

myself into trouble, and have the negro sheriff 
sent over by Campbell to arrest me.' And 
everyone went on the same principle, One 
of the negroes committed a brutal murder, 
but no notice was taken of it by any of 
the authorities, until, with much personal 
trouble, I had him arrested and shut up. 
Shortly afterwards, greatly to my astonish- 
ment and indignation, I met him walking 
about the place, and on inquiring how he had 
got out, was coolly informed that 1 a gentle- 
man had hired him, from the agent of the 
Freedmen's Bureau, to work on his planta- 
tion.' I went at once to the agent, and told 
him that if the man was not re-arrested at 



138 A Georgia Plantation. 

once and kept confined, I would report him to 
the higher authorities. 

A few days afterwards I visited the same 
negro in his prison (!) which turned out to be 
a deserted warehouse, with no fastening upon 
the door, and here I found him playing the 
fiddle to a party who were dancing. He did 
meet his fate however, poor fellow, at last, 
but not for three years, when our own courts 
were re-established, and he was tried, sen- 
tenced, and hanged. 

On another occasion I had to insist upon 
two of my own negroes being sent off the 
place, as they had been caught stealing rice. 
No one would try them, and my agent pro- 
posed to let them off for the present, as he 
needed their labour just then. 

Finding things so unsettled and unsatis- 
factory, I determined to remain at the South 
during the summer, fearing that we might 
after all lose the crops we had with so much 
difficulty got planted ; and part of the hot 
weather I passed at St. Simons, and part in 



I 



Reconstruction. i 39 

South Carolina, with the same friends I had 
been with the winter before. 

On St. Simons I found as usual a very 
different state of things from that on Butlers 
Island. The people were working like 
machinery, and gave no trouble at all, which 
was owing perhaps somewhat to the fact 
that there were only fifty, instead of three 
hundred, and at the head of the fifty was 
Bram, with eight of his family at work under 
him. He was really a remarkable man, and 
gave the tone to the whole place. And oh ! 
the place was so beautiful ; each day it 
seemed to me to grow more so. All the 
cattle had come down, and it was a pretty 
sight to see first the thirty cows, then the 
sheep, of which there were over a hundred, 
with their lambs, come in for the night, and 
then the horses led out to water before going 
to bed. I used to go round every evening to 
visit them in their different pens and places, 
where they were all put up for the night. 
The stable I visited several times a day, as I 



140 A Georgia Plantation. 

had not much faith in my groom, and once 
when I was telling him how to rub one of 
the horses down with a wisp of straw when 
he came in hot, he said, 'Yis, so my ole 
missus (my mother) taught me, and stand 
dere to see it done.' To which I could only 
say, ' You seem to have forgotten the lesson 
pretty thoroughly.' 

In July I went to South Carolina, and 
found my friends moved from the rice plan- 
tation to a settlement about fifteen miles 
distant in the pine woods, which formerly 
had been occupied entirely by the overseers, 
when the gentlemen and their families could 
afford to spend their summer at the North, a 
thing they no longer could afford, nor wished 
to do. The place and the way of living 
were altogether queerer than anything I 
had ever imagined. The village consisted of 
about a dozen houses, set down here and 
there among the tall pine trees, which grew 
up to the very doors, almost hiding one 
house from another. The place was very 



Reconstruction. 



141 



healthy and the sanitary laws very strict. No 
two houses were allowed to be built in a 
line, no one was allowed to turn up the soil, 
even for a garden, and no one, on pain of 
death, to cut down a pine tree ; in which way 
they succeeded in keeping it perfectly free 
from malaria, and the air one breathed was full 
of the delicious fragrance of the pines, which 
in itself is considered a cure for most ills. In 
front of each house was a high mound of 
sand, on which at night a blazing pine fire 
was lit to drive away malaria that might 
come from the dampness of the night. 
These fires had the most picturesque effect, 
throwing their glare upon the red trunks of 
the pines and lighting the woods for some 
distance around. 

The houses were built in the roughest 
possible manner, many of them being mere 
log-houses. The one we were in was 
neither plastered nor lined inside, one thick- 
ness of boards doing for both inside and 
outside walls. M and I slept literally 



142 



A Georgia Plantation. 



under the shingles, between which and the 
walls of the house, we could lie and watch 
the stars ; but I liked feeling the soft air on 
my face, and to hear it sigh softly through 
the tall pines outside, as I lay in bed. Occa- 
sionally bats came in, which was not so 
pleasant, and there was not one room in the 
house from which you could not freely dis- 
course with anyone in any other part of the 
building. Hampton Point, which I had always 
regarded as the roughest specimen of a house 
anyone could live in, was a palace compared 
with this. We were nevertheless perfectly 
comfortable, and it was really pretty, with 
numbers of easy-chairs and comfortable sofas 
about, and the pretty bright chintz curtains 
and covers, which looked very well against 
the fresh whitewashed boards ; and there 
was an amusing incongruity between a grand 
piano and fine embroidered sheets and pillow 
cases, relics of past days of wealth and luxury, 
and our bare floors and walls. 

Most of the people were very poor, which 



Reconstr uction. i 43 

created a sort of commonwealth, as there was 
a friendly feeling among them all, and desire 
to share anything good which one got with 
his neighbours; so that, constantly through 
the day, negro servants would be seen going 
about from one house to another, carrying 
a neatly covered tray, which contained pre- 
sents of cakes or fruit, or even fresh bread 
that some one had been baking. There was 
a meat club, which everyone belonged 
to, and to which everyone contributed in 
turn, either an ox or a sheep a week, which 
was then divided equally, each house re- 
ceiving in turn a different part, so that all 
fared alike, and one week we feasted sump- 
tuously off the sirloin, and the next, not so 
well, from the brisket. 

Mrs. P was most energetic, direct- 
ing the affairs of the estate with a masterly 
hand, and at the same time devoting her- 
self to the comfort and happiness of her 
children ; reading French or German, or 
practising music with her daughter in the 



144 A Georgia Plantation. 

mornings, and being always ready to re- 
ceive her boys on their return from their 
hard day's work on the plantation, to which 
they rode fifteen miles every morning, and 
back the same distance in the evening, with 
interest and sympathy in the day's work, and 
a capital good dinner, which especially ex- 
cited my admiration, as half the time there 
really seemed nothing to make it of. But 
they were better off than most of the people, 
who were very wretched. Many of them had 
their fine plantation houses, with everything 
in them, burnt to the ground during the war, 
and had no money and very little idea of 
how to help themselves. In the next house 

to us was Mrs. M , an elegant, refined, 

and cultivated old lady, with soft silver 
grey hair and delicate features that made 
her look like a picture on Sevres china, 
and as unable as a Sevres cup to bear any 
rough handling, but who lived without many 
of the ordinary necessaries of life, .and was 
really starving to death because she could 



Reconstr uction. 



145 



not eat the coarse food which was all she 
could get. 

Poor people ! they were little used to 
such hardships, and seemed as helpless as 
children, but nevertheless were patient and 
never complained. 

The woods around were full of deer, and 
the gentlemen hunted very often — not for 
sport so much as for food. They generally 
started about five o'clock in the morning and 
were aroused by a horn which was sounded 
in the centre of the village by the hunts- 
man. As soon as it was heard, the hounds 
began to bay from the different houses, at 
each of which two or three were kept, no 
one being rich enough to keep the whole 
pack ; but being always used to hunt to- 
gether, they did very well, and made alto- 
gether a very respectable pack. One day 
they brought home three deer, having started 
ten ; so for the next few days we had a grand 
feast of venison. 

Among other subjects connected with 

L 



146 A Georgia Plantation. 

our rice plantations was one which interested 
us all very much at that time— the ques- 
tion of introducing Chinese labour on our 
plantations in the place of negro labour, 
which just then seemed to have become 
hopelessly unmanageable. There seemed 
to be a general move in this direction all 
through the Southern States, and I have 
no doubt was only prevented by the want 
of means of the planters, which, as far as 
I personally am concerned, I am glad was the 
case. Just then, however, we were all very 
keen about it, and it sounded very easy, 
the Pacific Railway having opened a way for 
them to reach us. One agent actually came 
for orders, and I, with the others, engaged 
some seventy to try the experiment with, 
first on General's Island. I confess I felt a 
little nervous about the result, but agreed 
with my neighbours in not being willing to 
see half my property uncultivated and going 
to ruin for want of labour. It was not only 
that negro labour could no longer be de- 



Reconstk uction. i 47 

pended upon, but they seemed to be dying 
out so fast, that soon there would be but 
few left to work. This new labour would of 
course have sealed their doom, and in a few 
years none would have been left. I wrote 
about it at the time : — 

4 Poor people ! it seems impossible to 
arouse them to any good ambition, their one 
idea and desire being — not to work. Their 
newspaper in Charlestown, edited by a negro, 
published an article the other day on the 
prospect, and said it would be the best thing 
that could happen to the negroes if the 
Chinese did come, as then they too could 
get them as servants, and no longer have to 
work even for themselves. I confess I am 
utterly unable to understand them, and what 
God's will is concerning them, unless He 
intended they should be slaves. This may 
shock you ; but why in their own country 
have they no past history, no monuments, 
no literature, never advance or improve, and 
here, now that they are free, are going 



148 A Georgia Plantation. 

steadily backwards, morally, intellectually, 
and physically. I see it on my own place, 
where, in spite of school and ministers, and 
every inducement offered them to improve 
their condition, they are steadily going down- 
wards, working less and worse every year, 
until, from having come to them with my 
heart full of affection and pity for them, I 
am fast growing weary and disgusted. 

' Mrs. P , who when she first married 

and came to the South was a strong aboli- 
tionist, an intimate friend of Charles Summers 
and believer in Mrs. Stowe, says that she firmly 
believes them incapable of being raised now ; 
and a few days ago I had a long talk with 

Mrs. W , the cousin of an Englishwoman 

who married and came out here with all the 
English horror of, and ideas about, slavery. 
Her husband dying shortly after, left her in- 
dependent and very rich, so she determined 
to devote her life and means to the people 
who were thus thrown on her for help and 
protection. She first sent out to England for 



Re constr uction. 



149 



a young English clergyman, whom she 
established on the place ; she then built a 
beautiful little church of stone, with coloured 
glass windows, at great expense ; and their 

own houses, Mrs. W told me, were far 

better than English labourers' cottages. 

' Well, for forty years she and her clergy- 
man worked together among them. She never 
allowed one to be sold from the estate, and 
devoted herself to them as if they were her 
children. Then came the war, and in no part 
of the country did the negroes behave so 
badly as hers. They murdered the overseer, 
tore down the church, set up as a goddess a 
negro woman whom they called ' Jane Christ,' 
and now are in all respects as entire heathens 
as if they had never heard God's name 
mentioned, worshipping Obi, preaching every 
sort of heathen superstition, and a terror to 
the neighbourhood. 1 Mrs. W , broken- 
hearted, returned to England, where she had 
property, and the clergyman, a Mr. G , 

1 I now doubt a good deal of this story (1 881). 



150 A Georgia Plantation. 

her fellow-worker, on being asked some time 
ago to go to some gentleman's plantations to 
preach to the negroes, shook his head, and 
with his eyes full of tears said he would 
never preach again, his whole work and 
preaching for forty years having proved such 
a failure. And our own clergyman at Darien 
told me he had been working among the 
negroes all his life to the best of his powers, 
but felt now that not one seed sown among 
them had borne any good fruit. 

' I confess thinking of these things makes 
me heartsick. I don't understand why 
really good men doing God's work should 
have failed so utterly, because although, in- 
tellectually, I feel sure the negroes are in- 
capable of any high degree of improvement, 
morally, I have always thought their standard 
wonderfully high, considering their ignor- 
ance.' 

I remained at the South until the harvest 
was well under way, my own interest" being 
intensified by my friends, and we lived in a 



Re con st r uction. i 5 1 

perpetual state of excitement, fearing from 
day to day that something would happen to 
destroy our hardly-made crops. First it 
blew hard and we feared a gale, and then the 
rice birds appeared in such swarms we feared 
the crops would be eaten up. Then it rained, 
and we feared the cut rice would be wetted 
and sprout. And so on, until one day Mrs. 
P — — exclaimed, 'What a state of excite- 
ment and alternate hope and fear we live in ! 
Why, the life of a gambler is nothing to it.' 
The news that reached me of the rice from 
Butler's Island was sufficiently good to re- 
assure me, but from St. Simon's it was terrible. 
Major D— wrote me that the caterpillars 
had again attacked the cotton, and that for 
the third time we should probably see the 
entire crop eaten up before our eyes, within 
three weeks of perfection. Such beautiful 
crops as they were, too ! This gave the 
deathblow to the Sea Island cotton, at least 
as far as I was concerned, for I had not 
capital enough to plant again after losing 



152 A Georgia Plantation. 

three crops, and the place has never been 
planted since, but is rented out to the negroes 
for a mere nominal rent, and they keep the 
weeds down and that is about all. Some 
day I hope to see it turned into a stock farm, 
for which it is admirably suited, and would 
pay well. 

Before leaving the history of the South 
for this year, I cannot help saying a few 
words upon a subject which did not strike 
me as strange then, but does now, in looking 
back, as very significant of the way politics 
were regarded and treated by Southerners 
at the time. There I was, in South Carolina, 
' the hot-bed of Secession/ among some of 
the oldest South Carolina families, considered 
by most Northern people as the deepest-dyed 
rebels, whose time was still spent in devising 
schemes to overthrow the Government, who 
therefore could not be trusted with the rights 
of free citizens, and whose negroes it was 
necessary to protect in their rights by 
Northern troops, and yet neither in my letters 



Re con st r uction. 



153 



nor in my memory can I find one single 
instance of political discussion, or attempts 
to rebel against the new state of things, or 
desire to interfere with the new rights of 
the negroes. Night after night gentlemen 
met at one house or another, and talked and 
discussed one, and only one subject, and that 
was rice, rice, rice. 

Farmers are supposed never to exhaust 
the two subjects of weather and the crops, 
and we certainly never did, until one evening 
the daughter of the lady with whom I was 
staying burst out with, ' Do — do talk 01 
something else ; I am so tired of rice, rice, 
from morning till night, and day after day.' 
We might all have been aliens and foreigners, 
so little interest did we any of us take in 
any public questions, and I never heard it 
suggested to prevent the negroes voting, but 
only to get rid of them and get reliable 
labour in their place. The war was over, 
the negroes free, and voters, and the South 
conquered ; and never by the smallest word 



154 A Georgia Plantation. 

did I hear any suggestions made to try to 
alter the new condition of things, or to wish 
to do so, each man's motto being 4 Sauve 
qui peut/ 



155 



CHAPTER V. 
1870. 

UNDER WAY. 

Late in the winter of 1869 I returned to the 
South, having quite made up my mind that 
I must change my agent. The expenses 
were enormous ; so large, that even remark- 
ably good crops could not make the two ends 
meet, while there were no improvements 
made and no work done to justify such 
heavy expenditure, and not even accounts to 
show on what the money had been spent. 
The negroes were almost in a state of mutiny, 
and work for another year under existing 
circumstances was impossible. So I got rid of 
one agent and engaged another, the son of a 



156 A Georgia Plantation. 

former neighbouring planter, whom I liked 
personally and with whom the negroes 
professed themselves content. But owing to 
the mismanagement and want of firmness on 
the part of his predecessor, they were in an 
utterly demoralised and disorganised con- 
dition. Many of them left, not to work for 
anyone else, but to settle on their own 
properties in the pine woods ; and the others 
seemed inclined to be very troublesome. So 
for a time, until the effects of being paid, and 
Christmas, had worn off, I left them pretty 
much to themselves, giving the children 
another pretty tea and feast, which put the 
older ones somewhat in a good humour. 

Mr. N certainly did not want either 

courage or firmness, and I was rather startled 
one day to have a young man named Liver- 
pool, who had always been a troublesome 
subject, burst into the room in which I was 
sitting, and pointing to a wound in his fore- 
head which was bleeding pretty freely, say, 
' Missus, do you allow this kind of treatment ? ' 



/ 



Under Way. 157 

I smothered my exclamation of horror and 
indignant denial, and said, ' How did it 

happen ? ' ' Why,' replied the lad, ' Mr. N 

knocked me down and cut my head like this.' 
1 Well/ I said, ' before I decide, I must know 
what you have done.' ' Very well,' he said, 
• very well ; ' and turning on his heel, left the 
room. I was horribly frightened for fear, in 
his anger, he would shoot my agent, and 
throwing on my shawl, I ran out to find him 
and put him on his guard. He told me that 
Liverpool had been very insolent and in- 
subordinate to both the negro captain, who 
reported him, and to himself, and he had 
simply knocked him down, and cut his head 
slightly. My fears were, I believe, needless, 
for Liverpool's revenge was to try to sue 

Mr. N for damages, which however 

never came to anything, and so the trouble 
ended, although the man was of course 
dismissed from the place, being a really 
troublesome, bad fellow. 

One of my captains also had his head cut 



i 5 8 



A Georgia Plantation. 



open by another lad who was drunk, and 
who was flourishing a rice-hook about, which 
the old man tried to get from him, and 
was cut badly across the forehead. He came 
to me to have it plastered up, and was 
very anxious to know 'whether de brain 
was cut,' which I assured him was not the 
case, and being only a flesh wound it soon 
healed. 

By degrees things settled down, and the 
work began. My school seemed flourishing 
under a new teacher I had got from the North 
(the other young man having left). This was a 
young negro, who had been at a Theological 
Seminary near Philadelphia, preparing him- 
self for the ministry ; but his old father, a 
Massachusetts Baptist preacher, not wishing 
his son to become an episcopal minister, 
refused to give him any more money to con- 
tinue his studies, and so he was obliged to 
leave, and was anxious to get some employ- 
ment by which he could earn enough- money 
to finish his studies. This story the Bishop 



Under Way. 



159 



told me, adding that if I could get him some 
theological books, and let him read with some 
clergyman in the village, he would lose no 
time and could take up the course at the 
school again just where he had been obliged 
to leave off. Much interested, I at once got 
him several theological standard works which 
he asked for, and made arrangements with 
our Darien clergyman to let him read with 
him. How it ended belongs to next year's 
history. He certainly got the children on 
in a wonderful way ; but seeing how soon they 
forgot all he taught them, I doubt its having 
been more than a quick parrot-like manner 
of repeating what they had heard once or 
twice, which the negroes all have. But it 
sounded very startling to hear them rattle off 
the names of countries, lengths of rivers, and 
heights of mountains, as well as complicated 
answers in arithmetic. The little ones he 
taught to sing everything they learned, and 
they always began with a little song, that 
amused me very much, about the necessity 



160 A Georgia Plantation. 

of coming to school and learning, the chorus 
of which ran : — - 

For we must get an education 
Befitting to our station 
In the rising generation 
Of the old Georg — I — a : 

a thing I fear, however, they failed to do. 
One day I heard one boy say to another, 
' Carolina, can you spell " going in " ? ' ' Gwine 
in,' promptly replied Carolina, that being 
their negro way of pronouncing it. On one 
point I and this teacher never agreed, and 
that was about the head handkerchiefs and 
bead necklaces of the girls. About the last 
perhaps he was right, although their love of 
coloured beads was a very harmless little bit 
of vanity, 3 nd I always used to give them the 
handsomest I could find for their Christmas 
presents ; but the head handkerchief was not 
only pretty and becoming, but made them 
look far neater than either their uncovered 
woolly heads, or the absurd little hats they 
bought and stuck on in order to follow the 



Under Way. 



161 



fashions of their white sisters. Now that 
ladies everywhere have taken to wearing 
silk handkerchiefs made into turban-shaped 
caps, I suppose the negro women may be- 
come reconciled to their gay bandanas. 

We had a great many marriages this 
winter, and wishing to encourage the girls to 
become moral and chaste, we made the cere- 
mony as important as possible, that is, if a 
grand cake and white wreath and veil could 
make it so, for the ceremony, as performed 
by our old black minister, could hardly be 
said to be imposing, and I think I have gone 
through more painful agonies to keep from 
laughing at some of these weddings than 
from any physical suffering I ever experi- 
enced. The girls were always dressed in 
white, with our present of the wreath and 
veil to finish the costume, and the brides- 
maids in white or light dresses, while the 
bridegroom and groomsmen wore black frock 
coats, with white waistcoats and white gloves, 
all looking as nice as possible. The parson, 

M 



1 62 A Georgia Plantation. 

old John, received them at the reading-desk 
of the little church, and after much arranging 
of the candles, his book, and his big-rimmed 
specs, would proceed and read the marriage 
service of the Episcopal Church, part of which 
he knew by heart, part of which he guessed 
at, and the rest of which he spelt out with 
much difficulty and many absurd mistakes. 
Not satisfied with the usual text appointed 
for the minister to read, he usually went 
through all the directions too, explaining 
them as he went along thus : 4 " Here the man 
shall take the woman by the right hand," ' at 
which he would pause, look up over his 
spectacles and say, ' Take her, child, by de 
right hand and hold her,' and would then 
proceed. On one occasion, after he had read 
the sentence, Whereof this ring is given 
and received as a token and pledge," ' he 
said with much emphasis, ' Yes, children, it 
is a plague, but you must have patience/ 
When it was all over he would say to the 
bridegroom with great solemnity and a wave 



Under Way. 163 

of his hand, ' Salute de bride,' upon which 
the happy man would give her a kiss that 
could be heard all over the room. The worst 
of John's readings and explanations was that 
they differed every time, so we never could 
be prepared for what was coming, which 
made it all the more difficult not to laugh. 

On one occasion something happened 
which made the people titter, — not what he 
said, for that was always received most 
reverently, but some mistake on the part 
of the bridegroom, upon which he closed the 
book and in a severe tone said, 1 What you 
larf for ? dis not trifling, dis business ; ' which 
admonition effectually sobered us all. Poor 
old John Bull — he was a good old man, and 
had an excellent influence over the people, 
who obeyed him implicitly, and I was really 
sorry when he was no longer allowed to per- 
form the service. The Government passed 
a law that no unlicensed minister or magis- 
trate could perform the marriage service, 
which, of course, was quite right ; but not 

m 2 



164 A Georgia Plantation. 

wishing to lose my parson, or to have my 
people go off the place to be married, I sent 
him up to Savannah to have him licensed. 
But they found him too ignorant, and refused 
to do so, which I dare say was quite right 
too ; but it spoilt all my weddings and obliged 
John to retire into private life. 

The negroes had their own ideas of 
morality, and held to them very strictly ; they 
did not consider it wrong for a girl to have 
a child before she married, but afterwards 
were extremely severe upon anything like 
infidelity on her part. Indeed, the good old 
law of female submission to the husband's 
will on all points held good, and I once found 
a woman sitting on the church steps, rocking 
herself backwards and forwards in great 
distress, and on inquiring the cause I was 
told she had been turned out of church be- 
cause she refused to obey her husband in a 
small matter. So I had to intercede for her, 
and on making a public apology before the 
whole congregation she was re-admitted. 



Under Way. 



165 



To raise the tone among our young un- 
married women was our great object, and my 
friend and I dwelt much on this in teaching 
them, and encouraged their marrying young, 
in which, indeed, they did not need much 
encouragement, for they both marry very 
young, and as often as they are left widows. 
The funeral service was generally performed 
about three weeks after the person was buried, 
in order to have a larger gathering than was 
possible to get together on a short notice, 
and on one occasion I was rather startled to 
hear a man's second engagement announced 
on the day of his first wife's funeral. The 
following morning he came to me, and with 
many blushes and much stammering said, 
' Missus, I'se come to tell you something.' 
Not choosing to acknowledge that I had 
heard the gossip, I said, ' Well, Quash, what 
is it ? ' After a very long pause and much 
hesitation, he informed me he was going to be 
married again. ' Don't you think it is rather 
soon after Betsy's death, Quash ? ' I asked ; 



1 66 A Georgia Plantation. 

upon which he replied, ' Well, yes, missus, it 
is, but I thought if I waited, maybe I not get 
a gal suit me so well as Lizzie.' This was so 
unanswerable a reason that after consulting 
with my friend as to whether Quash's con- 
duct could be countenanced under our code of 
morality, we agreed to allow if; and a very 
gay, fine wedding it was, for he being a good- 
looking carpenter and she a pretty house- 
servant and a great favourite of ours, we 
exerted ourselves especially to give them a 
grand wedding. 

I had visits from several friends that 
year, and among others three Englishmen, one 
of whom was Mr. Leigh. I mention this 
because of rather a curious circumstance con- 
nected with his visit. The first Sunday after 
his arrival we sent him up to preach to the 
negroes, and he took for his text, 'And 
Philip said to the eunuch, Understandest 
thou what thou readest ? J telling them that 
the eunuch was some Ethiopian, and was the 
first individual conversion to Christianity 



Under Way. 



167 



mentioned in the Bible. After church, one of 
the negroes came up to him and, after thank- 
ing him, said Philip was come again to the 
Ethiopians ; and another, called Commodore 
Bob, told him he had been expecting him 
for three weeks. And when Mr. Leigh 
said, ' You never saw me before, how did you 
know I was coming ? ' replied, ' Oh yes, sir, I 
saw you in de spirit. A milk-white gentle- 
man rise out of the wild rushes and came 
and preached to us, and I said to my wife, 
" Katie, der will be a great movement in our 
church on dis Island." So I knew you in the 
spirit' Of course when I told the negroes 
afterwards I was going to marry Mr. Leigh, 
old Commodore Bob was more convinced 
than ever that the mantle of prophecy had 
fallen upon his shoulders, and that the 
' great movement ' was my marriage to their 
preacher. 

While I was receiving guests, and marry- 
ing and giving in marriage, the work on the 
plantation was going on pretty smoothly. 



1 68 A Georgia Plantation. 



After the first of the year, when about twenty 
of the hands left, and frightened me with the 
idea that all were going, then the exodus 
stopped, and after several attempts to get the 
upper hand of Mr, N- — — , my new agent, 
they gave in and settled down to work. But, 
of course, the loss of time and hands obliged 
us to cut down the quantity of land planted 
about one-third, and the idea that each year 
was to begin in this way was not encourag- 
ing. So we still talked of Chinese labour and 
machinery (my dream just then was a steam 
plough which was to accomplish everything), 
the want of capital being our only difficulty. 
I adopted a new plan with the negroes this 
year too, and would see and speak to no one 
but the head men, and if anyone still insisted 
on coming to me directly with complaints, I 
simply told him he might leave the place, 
findinp- that this silenced them, but did not 
make them leave one whit more than when I 
tried to persuade them to stay. 

just before we left we had a narrow 



Under Way. 169 

escape from drowning, and I have always 
believed that I owed my life to the presence 
of mind and coolness of the negroes. We had 
gone down to the cotton place to pay a fare- 
well visit, and in coming back, crossing the 
Sound, which one is obliged to do for about 
five miles, we were caught in a furious gale 
and cross sea. Our boat, being cut out of one 
log — a regular ' dug out ' — did not rise the 
least to the waves, and was made doubly 
heavy by having all our trunks piled in the 
bow. Then, besides the four carsmen, there 
was my maid, my friend, and her sister, a 
little girl of fourteen, and lastly, in the stern 
steering, myself. The sea was running so high 
that the boat would hardly mind the rudder 
at all, and suddenly the tiller rope broke, 
and I was just in time to catch the rudder 
with my hand to keep it from swinging round, 
and holding it so I had to steer the rest of 
the way. 

Not being used to steering in a rough 
sea, I did not understand that the right thing 



170 A Georgia Plantation. 

to do was to head the boat right at the 
waves, and could not help instinctively trying 
to dodge them, so that they struck us on the 
side and deluged us with wet besides very 
nearly capsizing us, and we were soon ankle 
deep in water. The negroes rowed with 
might and main, but seemed to make no pro- 
gress, and the wind was blowing such a gale 
they could not hear me when I shouted to 
them at the top of my voice. About half-way 
across the Sound some large piles or booms 
had been driven during the war to prevent 
the Northern gunboats entering, and on 
these we were rapidly being driven, and I, 
powerless to steer against the furious wind, 
felt sure a few moments more would dash us 
against them, and we should be drowned. I 
in vain shouted to the men, who of course, 
sitting with their backs to the bow, did not 
see what was before them, but my voice could 
not reach them, so I shut my eyes and held 
my breath, expecting each moment to feel the 
blow that would send us into eternity. Just as 



\ 



Under Way. 171 

we were literally on the piles, a huge wave 
struck us and drove the boat a little to one 
side, so that instead of striking the booms 
with our bow we slid between two of them, 
scraping each side of the boat as we did so — 
but were safe ! Utterly exhausted, I felt 
I could hold on to my helm no longer, and I 
told my friend, who was sitting directly in 
front of me, to pass the order on to the men 
to let us drift into the marsh, where we would 
lie until sunset, when perhaps the wind 
would go down. So we beat across and 
reached the marsh, where we rested for a few 
moments, holding on by the tall rushes, but 
found even there the wind and waves so 
violent we could not remain. 

The stroke oar, a man I was particularly 
fond of, though he was rather morose and 
suspicious, stood up, and holding on to the 
land by burying his oar in the mud, said, 
■ Missus, we can't stay here, the boat will be 
overturned. Trust me, and I will take you 
home safely. Only keep the head of the boat 



172 A Georgia Plantation. 

right at the waves, and don't let them strike 
us sideways.' So bracing myself up I took 
hold of my helm again, to do which I was 
obliged to stretch my arm as far back as 
possible, having no tiller rope, and we turned 
our head to the waves once more. The men 
started a favourite hymn of mine as they 
began to row, but the wind of heaven soon 
knocked the wind out of them, and they were 
not only obliged to stop singing, but before 
long were absolutely groaning at each stroke 
they made with the oars. Peter's speech and 
the attempt at a song had, however, quieted 
me, and enabled me to recover my pre- 
sence of mind, so I kept the boat headed 
steadily straight at the waves, and after four 
hours' more hard work we landed safe on 
Butler's Island, the river even there being 
lashed into such fury by the gale that we 
found it difficult to get out of the boat. 

The agent and negroes were terrified at 
the mere idea of our having attempted to 
cross the Sound in such weather, and advised 



Under Way. 



173 



me, as I valued my life, not to do it again, 
which was certainly a needless piece of advice. 
We afterwards compared notes, my friend 
saying, like a true soldiers daughter, that she 
felt sure we should be drowned, and had 
made up her mind to it ; the little sister had 
only thought it very disagreeable, and had 
not known there was any danger. And my 
maid said that when the first wave came she 
thought of her new bonnet, and put up her 
arm to save it (a very hopeless protection) ; 
that then, when she had seen we were rushing 
on the pilings, she had felt sure we should 
be drowned and was very much frightened. 
Still she thought of us, and said to herself, 
t Well, if we are drowned, there will be far 
more to mourn them than me,' which we 
thought rather touching. On one point we 
all agreed, and that was that the effort the 
men had made to sing was done to reassure 
me ; and as a proof of how exhausted they were 
with their work, when I sent up for them, 
not an hour after our arrival on the Island, to 



174 A Georgia Plantation. 

give them some whisky, they were all lying 
on the floor before the fire, sound asleep. 
My arm, with which I had held the helm, 
ached and trembled so for four days after- 
wards that I could not use it ; but thank God 
we were safe, and in less than a week after- 
wards on our way to the North. 

A month later I went to England with 
my sister, hoping things would work smoothly 
enough at the South to enable me to stay 
abroad all winter. . . . Vain hope ! 



175 



CHAPTER VI. 

FRESH DIFFICULTIES — NEGRO TRAITS- 
ABDICATION. 

In December I returned to the United States 
and the South, the reports I had received 
of the condition of things during my absence 
not being satisfactory, and they certainly did 
not improve on closer examination. There 
were no accounts at all at this time, but much 
money spent, and what my agent had done 
to set things so by the ears I never could 
make out, but by the ears they undeniably 
were. He had been very injudicious, and 
was far too hot-tempered to manage any 
people. The whole plantation was up in 
arms ; half the people had gone and the other 
half were ready to go when I arrived, and it 
was desperately hard work to restore any- 



iy6 A Georgia Plantation. 



thing like order. Even as late as the end of 
January I thought I should have to give up 
all idea of planting the larger Island. I merely 
put in about two hundred acres on General's 
Island, but by dint of bullying, scolding, and 
a little judicious compromising, I kept those 
who were going and brought back some who 
had left. One man, who had been a favourite 
of mine, tried to get off without seeing me ; 
but, hearing he was going, I went up to his 
house and asked him what he was about, to 
which he replied, ' Moving, missus, but I did 
not mean to let you catch me ; ' to which I 
said, ' Well, I have caught you, and you can 
just stop moving, for I don't intend you to 
leave the place/ which settled him, and he 
has been ploughing now steadily for three 
days. To-night the last man came in, and 
told me he would go to work in the morning. 
So now the machine is fairly started again, 
and will run for the year, the getting off being 
the only difficulty. 

I was very unhappy about my stroke oar, 



Fresh Difficulties. 



177 



Peter Mack, who behaved so splendidly last 
spring in that gale on' the Sound, and who 
had also made up his mind to leave. I did 
not say one word to him, thinking that the 
best course to pursue in his case ; but when 
yesterday he came in to report himself ready 
for work, I said, ' Well, Peter, I am glad you 
are going to stay. I was sorry to hear you 
were so anxious to leave me.' ' No, missus,' 
he said, ' I not so anxious to leave you, else I 
done gone, but if you had not come I should 
have gone.' This being obliged to use 
personal influence in every individual case 
was rather troublesome, and yet it was very 
pleasant to have them affectionate in their 
manner to me, and influenced by my presence 
into doing what I wanted. 

Not being able at once to find anyone 

in Mr. N 's place, I determined to try 

working with the negro captains alone, and 
endeavoured to excite their ambition and 
pride by telling them that everything de- 
pended upon them now, and I expected them 

N 



i;8 



A Georgia Plantation. 



to show me how well they could manage, and 
what a fine crop they would raise for me. 

My friend Major D , who, after six years 

of failure at cotton-planting had determined 
to give it up, but was anxious to remain at 
the South, consented to take charge of the 
financial part of the work for me, which was 
a great relief to my mind, and things seemed 
really for a time as if they would work 
smoothly. 

My school arrangements were not going 
well at all, and I soon found that the teacher 
I had was a very different person from what 
I had hoped and believed him to be. He also 
had got bitten with the political mania, and 
asked my permission to accept some small 
office in Darien, assessor of taxes I think 
it was, which would not in any way interfere 
with his work for me, but greatly increase 
his income. So I could not well refuse, 
although I did not like it, and it was ^on my 
first return that he asked me, before I had 
found out other things about him. I after- 



Negro Traits. 179 

wards found that he had entirely given up 
teaching Sunday school, or holding any 
services for the people on Sunday, and when 
I asked him why, merely said the people and 
children would not attend ; then, that he had 
quite given up all attempts at carrying on 
his own studies, and was no longer reading 
divinity with our Darien clergyman, but 
instead, was mixing himself up with all the 
local Darien politics ; and, lastly, bore but a 
very indifferent character there for morality, 
which at first I was inclined to disbelieve, 
until a disastrous affair proved the correctness 
of the reports. But this did not happen till 
the following year. 

Either I am right in believing the negro 
incapable of any high degree of intellectual 
training, or of being raised to a position of 
equality with the white race without deterio- 
rating morally, or my experience has been 
very unfortunate. This man was one proof 
of it, another was a negro clergyman, born in 
one of the British Colonies, educated in an 

N 2 



i So 



A Georgia Plantation. 



English college, and ordained deacon by an 
English Colonial bishop, so that never at any 
period of his life was he affected by having 
been a slave or held an inferior position. He 
had a church in Savannah, and conducted 
the service as he had been used to hearing it 
done, which was chorally ; he had a fine 
voice, and chanted and intoned very well 
himself, and had trained a choir of little 
negroes, whom he put in surplices, extremely 
well. I was much interested in all the 
accounts I had heard of him, and when I 
reached Savannah I went to his church, be- 
lieving that at last my question of whether 
a full-blooded negro was capable of moral 
and intellectual elevation, was affirmatively 
answered. A full-blooded African he cer- 
tainly was, and was so black you could hardly 
see him. The service was beautifully done, 
and his part of it was well and effectively 
rendered, so that I was wrought up 'to the 
highest pitch of excitement and enthusiasm 
when the sermon came, for which I had been 



Negro Traits. 



181 



anxiously waiting. It was on a religious life, 
and from beginning to end was highflown, 
and mere fine talk ; and when he mentioned 
the ' infidel Voltaire and the licentious Earl 
of Rochester' (his audience being composed, 
with the exception of my friend and myself, 
of the most ignorant and simple negroes), my 
enthusiasm and excitement collapsed with a 
crash, and I could have cried with grief and 
disappointment. Here were just the same 
old predominating negro traits — vanity, con- 
ceit, and love of showing off. About that 
man, too, there were stories told very unbe- 
coming a clergyman, and though I believe 
none of them were ever directly proved, he 
lost caste generally, and later on left Savan- 
nah. 

Another instance of disappointment was 
the son of one of our own head men, whom 
my sister and myself tried to have educated 
at the North, hoping he might become a 
teacher on the Island. His father is one of 
the best, most intelligent, and trustworthy 



182 



A Georgia Plantation. 



men I ever knew, and with much more firm- 
ness of character than the negroes generally 
possess, so much so that being now our head 
man he controls everything, and the gang of 
Irishmen who come to us regularly every 
winter obey his orders and work under him 
with perfect good temper and willingness — the 
only case of the sort I know ; and this man 
can neither read nor write, and is totally 
ignorant about everything but his work. 
He comes of a good stock ; his great-grand- 
father was my great-grandfather's foreman, 
and of his uncle, who died in 1866, my 
r ather, then alive, writes as follows : 'It is 
with very sad feelings that I write to tell 
you of the death of Morris, the head man 
of General's Island ; he was attacked with 
fever, and died in four days. Dr. Kenan 
attended him and I nursed him, but his 
disease was malignant in its character, and 
the medicines produced no effect. To me 
his loss is irreparable ; he was by far the 
most intellectual negro I have ever known 



Negro Traits. 



183 



among our slaves. His sense and judgment 
were those of the white race rather than the 
black, and the view he took of the present 
position of his race was sensible and correct. 
He knew that freedom entailed self-depend- 
ence and labour, not idleness, and he set an 
example to those whose labours he directed 
by never sparing himself in any way where 
work was to be done. These qualities were 
inherited ; his grandfather, likewise named 
Morris, was my grandfather's driver, and on 
one occasion was working on that exposed 
cotton tract situated on the small island 
opposite St. Simon's, and in consequence of 
the situation being so much exposed to the 
autumn gales, which are often tropical in 
their fury, no settlement was ever made on 
this tract, the negroes who worked it going 
over daily in boats from their houses on St. 
Simon's. The only building was the hurri- 
cane house, which was constructed of suffi- 
cient strength to withstand the force of the 
gales, and in one of the years — 1804 I think 



184 A Georgia Plantation. 

it was — when a terrific gale visited the coast 
and the negroes were at work on this place, 
old Morris, seeing signs of an approach- 
ing storm, ordered the people into that hur- 
ricane house. They, not wishing to take 
refuge there, preferred to make the attempt 
of reaching St. Simon's before the storm 
burst ; but old Morris, knowing that there 
was no time for this, drove them with the 
lash into the house, where they were hardly 
secured when the storm broke, and turned 
out to be one of the most terrible ever known 
on the southern coast. Of our negroes not 
a life was lost, though upwards of a hundred 
were drowned from a neighbouring island, 
who had rushed into their boats and tried to 
reach the mainland. My grandfather, wish- 
ing to reward Morris for his praiseworthy 
conduct, offered him his freedom, which, 
however, he declined, as he had a wife and 
family on the island, and preferred remaining. 
My grandfather then presented him with a 
considerable sum of money and a silver 



Negro Traits. 



185 



goblet, on which was engraved the following 
inscription : — 

TO MORRIS, 
FROM 

P. BUTLER, 

For his faithful, judicious, and spirited conduct in 
the hurricane of September 8, 1804, whereby 
the lives of more than 100 persons were, 
by Divine permission, saved. 

' This passed to his son, also a superior 
man, and from him to his grandson, Morris, 
who possessed it at the time of his death. 
He left no son to succeed him, but his 
nephew, Sey, I think, promises to turn out 
a worthy descendant.' 

This man, Sey, quite fulfilled my father's 
expectations, and was soon placed in a 
position of trust, from which he rose to be 
my foreman, the post he now holds. My 
sister and myself thought, therefore, that we 
could not do better than choose his son to 
be educated as a teacher, hoping that he 
would inherit his father's good qualities, 
moral and intellectual, and being glad to 



1 86 A Georgia Plantation. 



show our appreciation of his father in this 
way. We accordingly sent him to a large 
negro school or college in Philadelphia, 
which was under the direction of the 
Quakers, and in every way admirably 
managed, except that unless all the students 
were instructed for teachers, the course of 
education, which comprised Greek and Latin, 
algebra and trigonometry, was rather unsuited 
to fit them for any manual labour by which 
they might have to earn their bread. But 
this fault would apply to all American 
schools, I think, of this order. We made 
arrangements that little Abraham should 
lodge with the lady superintendent of the 
school, and nothing could have been more 
promising or more satisfactory than his start. 

For the first six months or year every- 
thing went well, and he learnt fast. Then 
the reports became less and less satisfactory, 
until, at the end of the second year, we were 
requested to remove him, as he was incor- 
rigibly bad — had broken open the teachers 



Negro Traits. 187 

desk, and climbed over the wall and in at 
the window of the school-house to steal, and 
otherwise so misbehaved himself as to make 
it impossible for them to keep him. I was 
dreadfully sorry to have to break this news 
to Sey, and I told him as gently as I could, 
but he felt the disgrace of having his son 
returned to him under such circumstances 
most keenly. 

The lad returned to the plantation, and 
his father at once set him to work in the 
field ; but time after time he ran off, twice 
stealing his father's money, until at last Sey 
begged that his name might be struck from 
off the books, as he himself would no longer 
have anything to do with him. Of course I 
don't pretend to say that having him educated 
was the entire cause of his turning out so 
badly, but I do believe that, had we never 
taken him from the South, and he had 
grown up under his father's severe and high 
standard of right, he would probably have 
turned out very differently. I think most likely 



i88 



A Georgia Plantation. 



that he was taught and encouraged in his 
bad ways by the town boys, who, finding him 
on his first arrival a simple and easy tool to 
manage, made a cat's-paw of him ; for, as I 
told his teacher, he certainly did not learn to 
climb walls and break in windows on the 
plantation, for there were no walls to climb 
or windows to break open there. 

Last winter, when my husband returned 
to the South for a short time, he found 
Abraham there again, at work under his 
father once more, having been to the North 
and elsewhere to look for work, but without 
success. I fear, however, that he was not 
much improved, from a story my husband 
told me of him. He said he was standing 
near the mill one day, where all the people 
were at work, when he saw several of the 
negroes running towards him, crying out, 
* Crazy man ! ' ' crazy man ! ' and perceived 
that Abraham — now grown into a powerful, 
large man — was rushing after them, brandish- 
ing an axe. He was followed by his father, 



Negro Traits. 



who was trying to disarm him, but whenever 
he approached near, Abraham threatened to 
brain him, so Sey could not get at him. He 
rushed past Mr. Leigh and into the mill, 
where the terrified women and children at 
work scattered in all directions ; then, going 
out on the wharf and throwing his arms up, 
made a tragical speech and prepared to jump 
into the river. This my husband at once 
called to his father and the others to let him 
do, and when he had taken the wild plunge, 
had him pulled into a boat, brought in, 
rubbed down, put to bed, and left to recover, 
which he did after a long sleep, being appa- 
rently quite well the next day. Sey's ex- 
planation was that he had trouble in his head, 
and had been like this before ; but whether 
he really did not know, or was ashamed to 
confess, that his son had been drinking, I do 
not know, but I believe that was undoubtedly 
the case. 

There was another half-descendant of old 
Morris — a son of a daughter of his by a 



190 A Georgia Plantation. 



white man whom she had met while in the 
interior during the war. Whatever became 
of the father is not known, as is usually the 
case in such instances, and the mother dying 
before the end of the war, old Morris took 
the little boy and his sister (whose father had 
undoubtedly been black, for she was as 
black as a little coal, while Dan, the boy, 
showed his white blood very plainly, and was 
extremely pretty), and it was with Morris's 
widow, old Cinda, that I found the two 
children living when I first took charge of 
the place, my father having allowed all three 
rations. My husband, who opened a night 
school the first year of our return after our 
marriage, soon picked Dan out as a favourite 
and begged me to give him employment 
about the house, which I did. I then took 
him to the North for the summer, and finally 
brought him to England. Having when I 
first married brought over a negro servant 
Avho gave me a good deal of trouble, al- 
though perhaps he was hardly to be blamed 



Negro Traits. 



191 



for having his head turned, considering how 
much all the English maid-servants preferred 
him to a white man, and that my lady's 
maid finally preferred to marry him — a pen- 
chant I could neither understand nor sym- 
pathise with — I had declared I would never 
bring another negro over ; but the desire to 
have one of my own people about me, Dan's 
youth, and my fondness for the boy, pre- 
vailed, and I brought him. He was made 
the greatest pet by everyone — his pretty 
face, gentle voice, and extreme civility making 
everyone his friend. The butlers at all the 
large houses I took him to said he was worth 
a dozen white boys. My own cook, who 
was old enough to be his mother, kept all 
the tit-bits and nice morsels for him, all the 
women servants spoilt and petted him, and I 
foresaw that very soon he would be utterly 
ruined, as no one kept him up to his work, 
and everyone let him do pretty much as he 
pleased. 

I was therefore greatly surprised to have 



192 A Georgia Plantation. 



him come to me one day and say he wished 
to be sent home, as he did not like his life in 
England ; the work was too hard. I had been 
scolding him for some neglect of duty the 
day before, and supposed he was a little put 
out and would soon get over it, as his work 
was certainly not hard, although it was of 
course regular, a thing I am sure a negro 
finds more irksome than anything else, as 
they seem to require at least half the day to 
lounge. Dan, however, never altered his 
desire, although I spoke to him several times 
about it, and after being over two years in 
England, not only well fed and clothed, but 
petted and spoilt, he returned to the planta- 
tion last winter. The boy had so much good 
in him and was so clever, besides having had 
such advantages, that I could not bear to let 
him go back to the South just to run wild 
and go to the bad, so I had a serious talk 
with him before he left, and made him promise 
that he would really take up some regular 
trade, and as he chose carpentering, my 



Abdication. 



193 



husband, who took him out, apprenticed him 
to our head carpenter, and I have hopes of 
his turning out well yet. But why he pre- 
ferred returning to his rough and uncom- 
fortable plantation life after having lived on 
the fat of the land in England, I never have 
understood, unless it be that the restraints of 
civilised life and regular habits were irksome 
and disagreeable to him. 

Meanwhile the winter wore on, the last I 
was ever to spend on the place as mistress, 
or rather supreme dictator, whose acts had 
hitherto been controlled by neither master 
nor partner. My last letter written before 
leaving is as follows : — 

Butler's Island : March 1871. 

Dearest M — — , My little place never 
looked so lovely, and the negroes are behaving 
like angels, so that my heart is very sad at 
the thought of leaving ; for although I suppose 
I shall come back some day, it will not be for 
some time, and no one knows what changes 
may take place meanwhile, and notwithstand- 

O 



194 A Georgia Plantation. 

ing all the trouble I have had I do love my 
home and work here so dearly. I never 
worked so hard as I have this winter, but never 
has my work been so satisfactory. I wrote you 
in my last how well my negroes were doing 
under my management, and I find the news of 
my success has spread far and wide. Every- 
one on the river started before I did, yet now 
I am far ahead of them all, being the only 
planter on the river who was ready to plant 
on the first tides. I began to feel a little 
anxious, however, at the idea of leaving the 
place entirely in charge of the negro captains 
as the time for my departure drew near, and 
so was greatly relieved when they came to me 
a few weeks ago, and begged that I would 
leave some one over them in my place when 
I left, saying, ' Missus, we must have a white 
man to back us when you gone ; de people 
not mind what we say ; ' which is one of the 
many proofs of how incapable of self govern- 
ment these people are, and how dependent 
upon the white race for support. I therefore 



Abdication. 



195 



looked out for an overseer to take charge of 

the planting (Major D acting only as 

my financial manager), and have engaged a 

Mr. S , formerly an overseer at Altama, of 

whom both Mr. C and the other gentle- 
men on the river who know him speak very 
highly in every way. He has been here 
about a week now, and so far has got on very 
well with the negroes, who usually try all 
sorts of pranks with a new-comer to see how 
much they can make out of him. He told 

Major D yesterday that he was utterly 

surprised at the condition of the place, as 
never since the war had he seen one in such 
good order, work so well done, and so orderly, 
obedient, and civil a set of negroes. 

Dear M , don't laugh at my boasting. 

I have worked so hard and cared so much 
about it, that it is more to me than I can 
express to know that I have succeeded. 

Major D too has straightened out all the 

accounts, so far as he can, of the past three 
years, so that I now see exactly what money 

o 2 



196 A Georgia Plantation. 

has been made and what spent, and although 
I am not quite prepared to say that anyone 
has cheated me, the reckless expenditure and 
extravagance that has been going on, with 
the absolute want of conscientious responsi- 
bility shown by my agents, makes me ill to 
think of. However, it is all over now, thank 
goodness ! and I can not only hope to at last 
make something out of the place, but leave it 
with a feeling of perfect security. 

My people had done so well that, feeling 
inclined for a little amusement myself, I 
thought I would reward them, and so gave 
them a holiday one day last week, and got 
up a boat race between my hands and Mr. 

C 's, which was great fun. The river 

was crowded with boats of all sizes and 
shapes, in the midst of which lay the two 
elegant little race boats, manned by six of my 
men and six of the Altama negroes. Splendid 
fellows all of them, wild with excitement and 
showing every tooth in their heads, they were 
on such a broad grin. 



Abdication. 



197 



Major W — — , who was staying with me, 

steered my boat, and Mr. C — the other, 

Major D — acting as starting judge, and at 

the crack of his pistol off they started, work- 
ing like men, perfectly cool and steady, row- 
ing down the river like the wind side by side, 
until they were within a few hundred feet 
of the wharf which was to be the goal, and 

on which Mr. C , his son, Mrs. C , 

Admiral T , and F and I were all 

assembled. Then my men made a mighty 
effort and shot ahead, winning by about four 
seconds. We had two races afterwards, one 
of which we beat, so that out of the three 
we won two. It was such fun, and I wish you 
could have heard the negroes afterwards, 
' explaining matters.' 

To-day, a poor blind woman, whose eyes 

F and S sometimes bathe, said to me, 

' Missus, when we meet in heaven, and dey 
say to me, Tina, der's your missus, I not look 
for your face, missus, for I not know dat, but 
I shall look for your works, as I shall know 



198 A Georgia Plantation. 

dem,' I was very much touched, indeed my 
heart is altogether very sad, and full of love 
for my poor people here, and I can't bear to 
think that in two weeks I shall have left them 
for so long. Good-bye. 

Yours affectionately, 

F . 



199 



CHAPTER V1L 

1871, 1872, AND 1873, 

ABSENTEES— A NEW MASTER— WHITE LABOURERS 
— ' MASSA '— ' LITTLE MISSUS '—NORTHERN 
IDEAS— CHURCH WORK— GOOD-BYE. 

In May of the same year I sailed for Europe, 
and in June was married. I remained in 
England until the autumn of 1873, when we 
returned to the United States. During the 
interval the accounts that reached us from the 
South were not satisfactory. The expenses, 
it is true, were cut down to nearly one-half 
what they had been before, and the negroes 
gave but little trouble, but one overseer 
turned out to be very incapable and entirely 
wanting in energy, making no fresh improve- 
ments and planting the same fields each 
year that had been under cultivation since the 



200 A Georgia Plantation. 

war, letting all the rest of the place grow 
into a complete wilderness. We also had 
a terrible loss during our absence in the 
destruction by fire of our mills and principal 
buildings. They were undoubtedly set on 
fire by one of the negroes to whom we had 
shown many and special favours, which had 
only had the effect of spoiling him to such an 
extent that he would not bear the slightest 
contradiction or fault found with his work. 
He had been reprimanded by the overseer 
and a dollar deducted from his wages for 
some neglect in his work, and this put him 
into such a passion that he refused to take his 
wages at all and went off, saying that it 
should cost us more than a dollar. This, and 
the fact that he was seen about the mill the 
morning of the fire, where he had no business 
to be, made us feel pretty sure that he was 
the incendiary, and although we never could 
prove it, it was a generally accepted idea 
that he was the man. 

By this fire about fifteen thousand dollars' 



A BSE NT EES. 2 O I 

worth of property was destroyed, including 
all our seed rice for the coming planting, and 
had it not been for the efforts of the Irishmen 
who were at work on the place, the dwelling- 
houses and other buildings would have 
gone too. The sight of a large fire seems to 
arouse the savage nature of the negroes ; they 
shout and yell and dance about like fiends, 
and often become possessed by an incendiary 
mania which results in a series of fires. They 
never attempt to put it out, even if it is their 
own property burning. 

Soon after this came the news that the 
teacher I had left on the Island to train and 
educate the people, not only intellectually but 
morally, had turned out very badly, and had 
led one of my nicest young servant girls 
astray, which, with the other disaster, so 
disheartened me as to make me feel unable 
to struggle any longer against the fate which 
seemed to frustrate all my efforts either to 
improve the property or the condition of the 
people, and I said I would do no more. My 



202 



A Georgia Plantation. 



husband, however, took a more practical view 
of the matter, and decided that as we could 
not abandon the property altogether we must 
go on working it, so he telegraphed the agent 
to get estimates for a new mill and to buy 
seed, and in fact to go on, which he did, and 
in course of time a new mill was built and a 
fresh crop planted. 

In the autumn of 1873 we determined to 
return to America, and the agitation among 
the agricultural labourers in England being 
then at its height, I thought we might 
advantageously avail ourselves of the rage 
among them for emigration, to induce a few 
to go out to Butler's Island and take the 
place of our Irish labourers there. It seemed 
a capital plan, but I did not know then what 
poor stuff the English agricultural labourer 
is made of as a general rule. Eight agreed 
to go, and a contract was made with them for 
three years, by which we bound ourselves to 
send them back at the end of the time should 
they desire to come, and have in the mean- 



A New Master, 203 

time fulfilled their part of the agreement ; 
the wages we agreed to give them were the 
highest given in the United States, and 
about three times higher than what they had 
received at home. As we intended to stop 
some little time at the North we shipped 
them direct to the South., where they arrived 
about a month before we did. On Novem- 
ber 1 we followed, and I was most warmly 
greeted by all the negroes, who at once 
accepted my husband as 1 massa.' 

Our own people seemed pretty well 

settled, and Major D said gave but little 

trouble, the greatest improvement being in 
their acceptance of their wages even- 
Saturday night without the endless disputes 
and arguments in which they used formerly 
to indulge whenever they were paid. But 
there were still a great many idle worthless 
ones hanmn^ about Darien, and when we 
arrived the wharf was crowded with as dirty 
and demoralised a looking lot of negroes as I 
ever saw, and these gave the town a bad name. 



204 A Georgia Plantation. 

Our Englishmen we found settled in the 
old hospital building which I had assigned to 
them, and which had been unoccupied since 
the school had been broken up, with the 
exception of one room which the people still 
used as their church. Besides this there 
were three others, about twenty feet square, 
nicely ceiled and plastered, into which I had 
directed the Englishmen should be put, and 
in one of these we found them all, eight men 
sleeping, eating, and living in the same 
room, from preference. They had not made 
the least effort to make themselves decently 
comfortable, and were lying upon the floor 

like dogs, although Major D had advised 

them to put up some bedsteads, offering the 
carpenter of the party lumber for the purpose, 
and an old negro woman to make them some 
straw mattresses, giving them a week to get 
things straight before they began their work. 
Two of them fell ill soon after, and then we 
insisted upon their dividing, half the number 
using one sleeping room and the rest the 



White Labourers. 



205 



other, keeping the third for a general living 
room, kitchen, &c. At first they seemed in 
good spirits and well satisfied, but nothing 
can describe their helplessness and want of 
adaptability to the new and different circum- 
stances in which they found themselves. 
They were like so many troublesome chil- 
dren, and bothered me extremely by coming 
to the house the whole time to ask for some- 
thing or other, until at last, one Saturday 
evening when they came to know if I would 
let them have a little coffee for Sunday, as 
they had forgotten to buy any, the shop 
being only half a mile distant across the 
river, I flatly refused, and said they must 
learn to take care of themselves. One was 
afterwards very ill, and I really thought he 
would die from want of heart, as from the 
first moment he was taken ill he made up 
his mind he should not recover, and I had 
to nurse him like a baby, giving him his 
medicine and food with my own hands, and 
finally when he was really well, only weak. 



206 



A Georgia Plantation. 



we had to insist upon his getting up and 
trying to move about a little, or I think he 
would have spent the rest of his life in bed. 

To make a long story short, they soon 
began to get troublesome and discontented, 
were constantly drunk, and shirked their 
work so abominably, that our negro foreman 
Sey begged that they might not be allowed 
to work in the same fields with his negroes, 
to whom they set so bad an example, by 
leaving before their day's work was finished, 
that they demoralised his gang completely, 
and made them grumble at being obliged to 
go on with their work after the ' white men ' 
had left. So when the end of their second 
year came we were most thankful to pay 
their way back to England and get rid of 
them. All left except one, who after starting 
rather badly settled down and became a 
useful hard-working man, and is still with 
us as head ploughman, in which capacity he 
works for about eight months of the year, 
spending the other three or four on our 



White Labourers. 207 

deserted cotton place, as the unhealthiness of 
the rice plantation prevents his remaining 
there during the summer months. During 
this time he plants a good vegetable garden 
for himself, spends most of his time fishing, 
and is taken care of by an old negro woman, 
who he assured my husband worked harder 
and was worth more than any white woman 
he had ever seen. But I am afraid his 
experience had been unfortunate, for he was 
the only married man in the party we brought 
out, and his being the only one who did not 
wish to return made us suspect domestic 
troubles might have had something to do 
with his willingness to stay. 

We had for several years employed a 
gang of Irish labourers to do the banking 
and ditching on the Island, and although we 
made no agreement with them about return- 
ing in the spring when we dismissed them, 
they came down each succeeding autumn, 
taking the risk of either being engaged again 
by us or by some of our neighbours, and 



208 A Georgia Plantation. 

hitherto we had always been ready to do so. 
But the winter we first had our Englishmen 
we decided not to have the additional heavy 
expense of the Irishmen, and so told them 
we did not want them. The result was that 
they were very indignant with the English- 
men, whom they regarded as usurpers and 
interlopers, and whose heads they threatened 
to break in consequence. 

Major D , half in fun, said to them, 

' Why, you shouldn't hate them ; you all come 
from the same country.' To which Pat indig- 
nantly replied, ' The same country, is it ? Ah, 
thin, jist you put them in the ditch along wid 
us, and ye'll soon see if it's the same country 
we come from.' A test they were quite safe 
in proposing, for the Englishmen certainly 
could not hold a spade to them, and after 
trying the latter in the ditch we were glad 
enough to engage our Irishmen again, which 
quite satisfied them, so that after that they 
got on very well with their ' fellow, country- 
men,' only occasionally indulging in a little 



White Labourers. 



Irish wit at their expense. They certainly 
were a very different lot of men, and while 
the Englishmen were endless in their com- 
plaints, wants, and need of assistance, the 
Irishmen turned into a big barn at the up- 
per end of the plantation, got an old negro 
woman to cook for them, worked well and 
faithfully, were perfectly satisfied, and with 
the exception of occasionally meeting them 
going home from their work of an evening 
when I was walking, I never should have 
known they were on the place. 

I must record one act to their honour, 
for which I shall ever feel grateful. Two 
years after the one of which I am now writing 
I was very ill on the plantation, and the white 
woman I had taken from the North as cook 
was lying dangerously ill at the same time, so 
that the management and direction of every- 
thing fell upon my nurse, an excellent Scotch- 
woman, who found some difficulty in pro- 
viding for all the various wants of such a sick 
household. The Irishmen hearing her say 

P 



210 A Georgia Plantation. 

one day that she did not know where she 
should get anything that I could eat, brought 
her down some game they had shot for 
themselves, and, being told that I liked it, 
every Monday morning regularly, for the rest 
of the winter, sent me in either hares, snipe, 
or ducks by one of the servants, without 
even waiting to be thanked, the game they 
shot being what they themselves depended 
upon for helping out their scanty larder. 

I felt a little anxious at first about the 
effect such a new life and strange surround- 
ings might have upon my husband, for 
although he had seen it before, it was a very 
different matter merely looking at it from a 
visitor's point of view, and returning to live 
there as owner, when all the differences 
between it and his life and home in England 
would be so apparent. However, I soon 
found that I need not be uneasy upon that 
score, as he at once became deeply interested 
in it, and set about learning all the ^details of 
the work and peculiarities of both place and 



Massa. 



211 



people, which he mastered in a wonderfully 
short time, showing a quick appreciation of 
the faults and mistakes in the previous system 
of planting which he had followed since the 
war, and which he very soon tried on an 
entirely different plan. This was so success- 
ful that in a year the yield from the place 
was doubled and the whole plantation bore a 
different aspect, much to the astonishment 
of our neighbours, who could not understand 
how an Englishman, and English parson at 
that, who had never seen a rice field before 
in his life, should suddenly become such a 
good planter. The negroes, after trying 
what sort of stuff he was made of, became 
very devoted to him, and one of the old men, 
after informing my sister some little time 
afterwards how much they liked him and 
how much good he had done them all, wound 
up with 'Miss Fanny (me) made a good 
bargain dat time.' 

My husband wrote a number of letters to 
England from the plantation during the time 



212 A Georgia Plantation. 

we remained there, which were published in a 
little village magazine for the amusement of 
the parishioners who knew him, and which I 
think I cannot do better than add to this 
account of mine, as they will show how every- 
thing at the South struck the fresh and 
unbiassed mind of a foreigner who had no 
traditions, no old associations, and no preju- 
dices, unless indeed unfavourable ones, to in- 
fluence him. 

After having spent the summer at the 
North, we again returned to the plantation in 
November, taking with us this time an addi- 
tion to the family in the shape of a little three- 
months-old baby, who was received most 
warmly by the negroes, and christened at 
once ' Little Missus,' many of them telling 
me, with grins of delight, how they remem- 
bered me ' just so big.' I very soon found 
that the arrival of ' young missus ' had 
advanced me to the questionable position of 
' old missus,' to which however I soon -became 
reconciled when I found how tenderly 1 Little 



'Little Missus! 213 

Missus ' was treated by all her devoted sub- 
jects. Oddly enough, the black faces never 
seemed to frighten her, and from the first she 
willingly went to the sable arms stretched 
out to take her. It was a pretty sight to see 
the black nurse, with her shining ebony face, 
surmounted by her bright- coloured turban, 
holding the little delicate white figure up 
among the branches of the orange trees to 
let her catch the golden fruit in her tiny 
hands ; and the house was kept supplied 
almost the whole winter with eggs and 
chickens, brought as presents to ' Little 
Missus.' 

Another summer at the North and back 
again to the South, from whence nothing but 
good reports had reached us of both harvest 
and people. Indeed our troubles of all sorts 
seemed to be at an end, at least such as arose 
from 'reconstruction.' It came in another 
shape, however, and in January 1876 I was 
taken very ill, and for five days lay at the 
point of death, during which time the anxiety 



214 A Georgia Plantation. 

and affection shown by my negroes was most 
profound, all work stopped, and the house was 
besieged day and night by anxious inquirers. 
My negro nurse lay on the floor outside my 
door all night, and the morning I was pro- 
nounced out of danger she rushed out, and 
throwing up her arms, exclaimed, i My 
missus'll get well ; my missus'll get well ! I 
don't care what happens to me now/ And 
when at last I was able to get about once 
more, the expressions of thankfulness that 
greeted me on all sides were most touching. 
One woman, meeting me on the bank, flung 
herself full length on the ground, and catching 
me round the knees, exclaimed, ' Oh, tank de 
Lord, he spared my missus.' A man to whom 
something was owing for some chickens 
he had furnished to the house during my ill- 
ness refused to take any money for them, 
saying when I wished to pay him, ' No, dey 
tell me de chickens was for my missus, and 
Fse so glad she's got well I don't want no 
money for dem.' My dear people ! 



Northern Ideas. 



215 



Our poor old housekeeper, less fortunate 
than myself, did not recover, but died just as 
I was getting better, and in looking over her 
letters after her death, in order to find out 
where her friends lived, so as to let them 
know of her death, I found to my astonish- 
ment that she had been in terror of the 
negroes from the first, and had a perfect 
horror of them. Being so fond of them my- 
self, and feeling such entire confidence in 
them as not even to lock the doors of the 
house at night, it never occurred to me that 
perhaps a New England woman, who had 
never seen more than half-a-dozen negroes 
together in her life, might be frightened at 
finding herself surrounded by two or three 
hundred, and it was only after her death that 
I found from the letters written to her by 
different friends at the North, in answer to 
hers, what her state of mind had been. There 
were such expressions as these : ' I don't 
wonder you are frightened and think you 
hear stealthy steps going about the house at 



2l6 



A Georgia Plantation- 



night.' 4 How horrible to be on the Island 
with all those dreadful blacks/ ' The idea of 
there being only you three white people on 
the Island with two hundred blacks ! ' &c„ 
She had apparently forgotten, in making her 
statement, the eight Irish and six English 
labourers who were living on the Island, but 
still the negroes certainly did greatly out- 
number the whites, and could easily have 
murdered us all had they been so inclined. 
But there was not the least danger then, 
whatever there might have been the first year 
or two after the war, and even at that time I 
never felt afraid, for had there been a general 
negro insurrection, although my own negroes 
would of course have joined it, there were 
at least a dozen, I am sure, who would have 
warned me to leave the place in time. 

My sister paid me a visit this winter — her 
first to the South since the war, except in 
1867, when she spent a month with us, but 
on St. Simon's Island, where she saw little or 

m 

nothing of the negroes — and she was greatly 



Church Work. 



217 



struck with their whole condition and 
demeanour, in which she said she could not 
perceive that freedom had made any differ- 
ence. In answer to this I could only say 
that if she had been at the South the first 
three years after the war, she would have 
seen a great change in their deportment, but 
that since that they had gradually been 
coming back to their senses and ' their 
manners/ 

This winter we had the pleasure of seeing 
a very nice church started in Darien for the 
negroes. For three years my husband had 
been holding services for them regularly on 
the Island in a large unoccupied room which 
we had fitted as a chapel ; but we found this 
hardly large enough to accommodate out- 
siders, and as many wished to attend who 
were not our own people, we thought Darien 
the best place for the church. While it was 
being built, service was held in a large barn 
or warehouse, which was kindly lent for 
the purpose by a coloured man of consider- 



218 A Georgia Plantation 

able property and good standing in the com- 
munity, who although a staunch supporter 
of the Presbyterian Church himself, was 
liberal-minded enough to lend a helping hand 
to his brethren of a different persuasion. 

The following extract from the report of 
our Bishop came to me somewhat later : — 

April 9. — Held evening service, assisted 
by the Rev. J. W. Leigh, of England, and 
the Rev. Dr. Clute. Confirmed twenty-one 
coloured persons, and addressed the candi- 
dates in St. Philip's Mission Chapel, Butler's 
Island. I desire publicly to express my 
thanks to the Rev. Mr. Leigh, for the faith- 
ful and efficient service he has rendered the 
Church in Georgia during his stay in America. 
He has trained the coloured people on Butler's 
Island in the doctrines, and has brought to 
bear upon them the elevating influence, of 
the Church, with a thoroughness and kindness 
which must, under God, be fraught with good 
to those poor people who for so many years 



Church Work. 



219 



have been the victims of so-called religious ex- 
citements and fancied religious experiences. 

April 1 1.— Held morning service, assisted 
by the Rev. Dr. Clute. Preached, and con- 
firmed six in St. Andrew's, Darien. In the 
afternoon I held service for coloured people 
in Darien, assisted by the Rev. Dr. Clute, 
who presented seven coloured candidates for 
confirmation, and the Rev. Mr. Leigh, who 
presented one. After confirmation I ad- 
dressed the candidates. In the evening I 
held service in the Methodist Church, 
assisted by the same brethren. Preached, and 
confirmed three coloured persons in Darien. 
The Church is taking a strong hold upon 
the coloured people in Darien, as also upon 
Butler's Island. The Rev. Dr. Clute had 
twenty-eight candidates whom he expected 
to present, but they were prevented from 
coming by a storm. 

Also in the appendix is added the follow- 
ing paragraph :— 



220 



A Georgia Plantation. 



The Rev. the Hon. J. W. Leigh, M.A., 
reports from Butler's Island that he has had 
fourteen baptisms, twenty-two candidates con- 
firmed, twenty-nine communicants, and three 
marriages. It is also announced that the 
frame of the Chapel (St. Athanasius) for the 
coloured mission in Darien has been erected, 
and will be enclosed as soon as money can 
be obtained for the expense. The confirmed, 
as well as many candidates who w r ere absent 
from the rite because of a rain-storm and 
change of the day of appointment, have had 
no opportunity to communicate. 

This winter was destined to be the last 
I was to spend at the South, as my husband 
had made up his mind finally to return to his 
own country to live. Before leaving I had 
broken up my little plantation establishment, 
selling the principal part of the furniture, 
carpets, and so forth, and I consider it a sig- 
nificant proof of the well-to-do condition of 
the negroes, that the best and most expensive 



Good-Bye. 



221 



things were bought and paid for on the spot 
by negroes. The drawing-room carpet, a 
handsome Brussels one, was bought by a rich 
coloured man in Darien, the owner of a large 
timber mill there, a man universally respected 
by everyone, and, if I am not mistaken, 
who has for years held an official position of 
some importance in Darien. He was not a 
slave before the war, but owned slaves him- 
self. 

The following November my husband 
returned to the plantation for a couple of 
months alone, in order to settle up everything 
finally, before we sailed in January for Eng- 
land. This was the winter of the Presidential 
election, when our part of the country was, 
like every other section, violently agitated 
and excited by politics. But with us, while 
of course everyone did the best he could for 
his party, there was not the least ill-feeling 
between the blacks and the whites, and the 
election passed off without any trouble of 
any sort, which is a noteworthy fact in itself, 



222 A Georgia Plantation. 

as our county is one of the two in Georgia 
where the negroes outnumber the whites ten 
to one, and in more than one instance a negro 
was elected to office by the white democratic 
votes. 



223 



CHAPTER VIII. 
1877, 1878, 1879. 

OVER THE WATER. 

And now I have come to these last three 
years of my history, which are so much the 
same, and marked by so few incidents, that a 
few pages will suffice for them. 

In the autumn of 1877, not a year after 
our return to England, our old friend and 

agent Major D died, and in many ways 

his loss was an irreparable one to us, but 
nothing showed the changed and improved 
condition of the negroes more than the fact 
that his death did not in the least unsettle 
them, and that the work went steadily on 
just the same. A few years before, a sort of 



224 



A Georgia Plantation. 



panic would have seized them, and the idea 
taken possession of them that a new man 
would not pay them, or would work them 
too hard, or make new rules, &c. &c, and it 
w r ould have been months before we got them 
quieted and settled down again. But now, 

although Major D was much liked and 

respected by them, as indeed he was by the 
whole community, Northern man though 
he was, and Northern soldier though he had 
been, they knew that whoever was put in 
his place would carry out the old rules, and 
pay them their wages as regularly as before. 

In September of the year 1878 a terrible 
storm visited the Southern coast. The hur- 
ricane swept over the Island just in the 
middle of the harvest, and quite half the crop 
was entirely destroyed, and the rest injured. 
What was saved was only rescued by the 
most energetic and laborious efforts on the 
part of the negroes, who did their utmost. 
Day after day they did almost double their 
usual task, several times working right 



Over the Water. 



225 



through the night, and twice all Sunday ; 
cheerfully and willingly, not as men who 
were working for wages, but as men w r hose 
heart was in their work, and who felt their 
interests to be the same as their employers. 

Later on in the same year my husband 
returned to the United States and revisited 
the property, but finding everything working 
well and satisfactorily, only remained about 
six weeks. 

, Our present manager is the son of a 
former neighbour of ours, whom the negroes 
have known from childhood, and to whose 
control they willingly submit. In engaging 
a person to manage such a property two 
things are necessary : first, that he should be 
a Southern man, because no one not brought 
up with the negroes can understand their 
peculiarities, and a Northern man, with every 
desire to be just and kind, invariably fails 
from not understanding their character, 

Even Major D felt this, although he had 

been so long among them, and latterly never 

Q 



226 A Georgia Plantation. 

would take charge of any but the financial 
part of the business. And secondly, the 
person put over them must be a gentleman 
born and bred, for they have the most 
comical contempt for anyone they do not 
consider ' quite the thing,' and they perceive 
instinctively the difference. This I suppose 
is a remnant of slave times, when there were 
the masters, the slaves, and the poor white 
class, regarded with utter contempt by the 
negroes, who called them ' poor white trash.' 
To a gentleman's rule they will submit, but 
to no other, and it is useless to put a person 
holding an inferior social position over them. 

The only plantations near us which are 
well and successfully worked, are managed 
either by their old masters, or gentlemen 
Irom the neighbourhood. We all pay wages 
either weekly or monthly, finding that the 
best plan now. It is far the easiest for our- 
selves, as well as satisfactory to the negroes, 
who can't think they are cheated when every- 
thing is paid in full every Saturday night, 



Over the Water, 227 

nor can they forget in that short time what 
days they have been absent or missed work. 
I do not believe they put by one penny out 
of their good wages, but they like to have a 
little money always in hand to spend, and 
much prefer this system of payments to a 
share in the crop or to being paid in a lump 
at the end of the year. I have tried all three 
plans, and do not hesitate to say this is the 
best. And so, with good management, good 
wages paid regularly, and no outside inter- 
ference, there need be no trouble whatever 
with Southern labour. But of the three I con- 
sider outside interference by far the worst evil 
Southern planters have to contend against 

The negroes are so like children, so un- 
reasoning and easily influenced, that they are 
led away by any promise that sounds fair, or 
inducement which is offered. And although 
I confidently assert that nowhere in the world 
are agricultural labourers in a better condi- 
tion, or better paid, than our negroes, and 
that though for twelve years they have been 

Q 2 



228 



A Georgia Plantation. 



well paid, and never have known us to break 
our promises to them, yet I am perfectly sure 
that if anyone should visit Butler's Island to- 
morrow, absolute stranger though he might 
be, and promise the negroes houses, or land, 
or riches in Kansas or in Timbuctoo, they 
would leave us without a moment's hesitation, 
or doubt in their new friend's trustworthiness, 
just as my child might be tempted away from 
me by any stranger who promised her a new 
toy. Children they are in their nature and 
character, and children they will remain until 
the end of the chapter. 

Oh, bruders, let us leave 
Dis buckra land for Hayti, 
Dah we be receive 
Grand as Lafayetty. 
Make a mighty show 
When we land from steamship, 
You'll be like Monro, 
Me like Lewis Philip. 

O dat equal sod, 

Who not want to go-y, * 

Dah we feel no rod, 

Dah we hab no foe-y, 



Over the Water, 



229 



Dah we lib so fine, 

Dah hab coach and horsey, 

Ebbry day we dine, 

We hab tree, four coursey. 

No more our son cry sweep, 
No more he play de lackey, 
No more our daughters weep, 
'Kase dey call dem blacky. 
No more dey servants be, 
No more dey scrub and cook-y, 
But ebbry day we'll see 
Dem read de novel book-y. 

Dah we sure to make 

Our daughter de fine lady, 

Dat dey husbands take 

'Bove de common grady ; 

And perhaps our son 

He rise in glory splendour, 

Be like Washington, 

His country's brave defender.' 1 

Put Kansas for Hayti, and 1879 for 1840, 
and haven't we exactly the same story ? 

1 This delightful song was composed somewhere about 
1840, at the time of one of the Haytian revolutions, when the 
negroes, imagining that they would have no more work to do, 
but all be ladies and gentlemen, took the most absurd airs, 
and went about calling themselves by all the different dis- 
tinguished names they had ever heard. 



230 



A Georgia Plantation. 



ADDENDA. 

<x» 



Having written the foregoing pages some 
years ago, and having just returned from 
another visit to the South, after an absence of 
six years, I cannot refrain from adding a few 
words with regard to the condition of the 
negroes now and formerly, and their own 
manner of speaking of their condition as 
slaves. The question whether slavery is or 
is not a moral wrong I do not wish or intend 
to discuss ; but in urging the injustice of 
requiring labour from people to whom no 
wages were paid, which was formerly dne of 
the charges brought against the masters, it 
seems strange that wages were * always 
thought of as mere money payments, and the 



Old Times. 231 

fact that the negroes were fed, clothed, and 
housed at their masters' expense was never 
taken into account as wages, although often 
taking more money out of the owner's pocket 
than if the ordinary labourers' wages had 
been paid in hard money. Besides these 
items, a doctor's services were furnished, one 
being paid a certain yearly salary for visiting 
the plantation, three times a week I think it 
was, and of course all medicines were given 
to them free of charge. They were, besides, 
allowed to raise poultry to sell, and chickens, 
eggs, and the pretty baskets they used to 
make often brought the industrious ones in 
a nice little income of their own. At Christ- 
mas all the head men received a present of 
money, some being as high as ten pounds, 
and every deserving negro was similarly 
rewarded. 

These facts I learned accidentally in look- 
ing over the old plantation books which fell 
into my hands about a year ago. I also found 
from old letters how particular the owners 



232 A Georgia Plantation. 

always were to have the best goods fur- 
nished for the people's clothing. The winter 
material was a heavy woollen cloth called 
Welsh plains, which was imported from 
England, and many of the letters contained 
apologies and explanations from the Liver- 
pool firm who furnished the goods about the 
quality, which had evidently been found fault 
with. The character of the goods was also 
confirmed by the testimony of the negroes 
themselves, my housemaid saying one day 
apropos of the heavy blankets on my bed, 
' Ah, in de old time we hab blankets like dese 
gib to us, but now we can only buy such poor 
ones dey no good at all ; ' and another, not 
one of our people, meeting us in a shop in 
Darien, turned from the rather flimsy cloth 
he was bargaining for, and taking hold of the 
dark blue tweed of my husband's coat, said, 
' Sar, ware you git dis stuff ? We used to git 
dis kind before the war, but now we neber 
sees it.' 

Two extracts from letters written by 



Old Times. 233 

former agents to my great-uncle about the 
negroes bear such strong testimony to the 
way in which the slaves were thought of, 
spoken of, and treated ' in de old time/ that 
I cannot resist copying them, especially 
as it was with a feeling of real pleasure 
that I read them myself. One was written in 
1827 and the other in 1828. 

In the first the overseer writes : ' I killed 
twenty-eight head of beef for the people's 
Christmas dinner. I can do more with them in 
this way than if all the hides of the cattle were 
made into lashes ! ' In the other he says, ' You 
justly observe that if punishment is in one 
hand, reward should be in the other. There 
is but one way of managing negroes, particu- 
larly with so large a gang as I have to do 
with, and many of them in point of intellect 
far superior to the mass of common whites 
about us. A faithful distribution of rewards 
and punishments, and different modes of 
punishment ; not always resorting to the lash, 
but confinement at home, cutting short some 



234 



A Georgia Plantation. 



privilege, and never inflicting punishment 
without regular trial. We save many tons of 
rice by giving one to each driver ; it makes 
them active and watchful.' 

So much for their treatment as slaves, 
and surely food, clothing, medicine and medi- 
cal attendance, to say nothing of the twenty- 
eight head of beef killed for their Christmas 
dinner, might justly be regarded as wages or 
an equivalent for their labour. It is quite 
true they were not free to leave the place 
or choose their masters, but, until a very few 
years ago, were the majority of English la- 
bourers able to change their places or better 
their condition ? Far less well off in point of 
food, clothing, and houses, the low wages and 
large families of the English labourer tied him 
to the soil as effectually as ever slavery did the 
negroes ; and I doubt our slaves being will- 
ing to change places with the free English 
labourer of those days, had the change been 
offered him. 

Now with regard to their own views 



Old Times. 



235 



regarding their condition. They were always 
represented, and supposed to be by the 
Abolitionists, as pining for freedom, thirsting 
for education, and breaking their hearts over 
ill-treatment, separation from their children, 
and so on. Now in answer to this, which 
still stands as a reproach against those who 
ever owned slaves, I give one or two stories 
from the lips of the negroes themselves, and 
also a few facts of the present state of things 
twenty years after the emancipation of the 
slaves. 

One of our former drivers was robbed by 
one of the other negroes of two hundred 
dollars he had laid by, and in speaking of 
it he said with a sigh, ' Ah, missus, in de ole 
time de people work all day and sleep all 
night, and hab no time for 'teal ; ' evidently 
thinking that state better than the present 
condition of freedom to be idle, and its 
natural consequence, dishonesty. Another 
poor old man, who had had his house burnt 
down and lost all his little savings, chickens, 



236 A Georgia Plantation. 

and pigs, happened to mention that his wife 
had died shortly before. I had not heard it, 
and told him so, expressing my sorrow at the 
same time. ' You didn't know it, missus ! ' 
said the old man, in a tone of indignant sur- 
prise. ■ Ah, tings different now from de ole 
times; den if any of de people die, de ober- 
seer hab to write to Massa John or Massa 
Peirce, and tell 'em so-and-so's dead, but now 
de people die and dey buried, and nobody 
know noting about it.' Another amused 
me very much by regretting that he was no 
longer allowed to correct the young people 
indiscriminately, and said that formerly if you 
' flogged de children de parents much obliged 
to you, but now de young people 'lowed to 
grow up wid no principle.' 

One old man, who had been sold many 
years ago, had found his way back after all 
this time to the old home, and was full of affec- 
tionate gratitude at being allowed once more 
to see us. When I said, ' I hope yoii found 
some of your own people left, Bristol,' he said, 



New Times. 237 

' I not come to see dem, missus, I come to 
see my ole massa's family, and it rejoiced my 
heart to see you and dear little missus.' 

These it may be said are the old people, 
but I found the young ones had just the 
same feeling of belonging to the same place 
and family as their fathers, constantly saying, 
when I met them off the place and did not 
recognise them, ' We your people, missus ; ' 
and these, many of them, were not even born 
in slavery, and were not working for us now. 

So much for their own feeling as regards 
their past condition of servitude. I don't 
for one moment pretend that they would 
willingly return to slavery, any more than 
we would have them slaves again, but I 
merely give these instances to show that 
they did not suffer under the system or 
regard it with the horror they were supposed 
to do by all the advocates of abolition. 

Now for their present moral, physical, 
and intellectual condition, their own people 
will tell you of each other, that they will not 



238 A Georgia Plantation. 

only steal money when they get the chance, 
but their neighbours' poultry, and in fact 
nearly all they can lay their hands on. Yet 
before the war absolute confidence was 
placed in their trustworthiness, and that we 
were justified in so doing will be seen by 
some stories I have told in the foregoing 
pages, of their faithful guardianship of our 
property, and even money, during the trying 
war times. 

Formerly, the race was a most prolific 
one, and ten or fifteen children a common 
number to a family ; now two or three seem 
to be the usual allowance, and many of the 
young women at whose weddings I had 
assisted ten years or so ago, in answer to 
my question, ' Have you any children ? ' would 
answer, ' I had ' one, two, or three, as the 
case might be, ' but dey all dead.' Always 
inclined to be immoral, they have now 
thrown all semblance of chastity to the 
winds, and when I said to my old nurse 
how shocked and grieved I was to find how 



New Times. 239 

ill-conducted the young girls were, so much 
worse than they used to be, she said, ' Missus, 
dere not one decent gal left in de place.' 
Their thirst for knowledge, which made 
young and old go to school as soon as the 
war was over, seems to have been quenched 
entirely, for, with one or two laudable excep- 
tions, no one sends even their children to 
school now, and soon we shall have to intro- 
duce compulsory education. The only two 
negroes on the place who can write and add 
up accounts are the one we had educated at 
the North, and the one we had in England 
for three years. And yet it is twenty years 
since they were freed, and have been their 
own masters. 

What has become of their longing for 
better things, and what is to become of them, 
poor people, ignorant and degraded as they 
are, and, so far as one can see, becoming 
more and more so ? As far as the masters 
are concerned, they are far better off — re- 
lieved from the terrible load of responsi- 



240 A Georgia Plantation. 

bility which slavery entailed, and I have 
always been thankful that before the pro- 
perty came into my hands, the slaves were 
freed. But for the negroes, I cannot help 
thinking things are worse than when they 
were disciplined and controlled by a superior 
race, notwithstanding the drawbacks to the 
system, and, in some cases, grave abuses 
attending it. If slavery made a Legree, it 
also made an Uncle Tom. 



APPENDIX. 

No. i. 
Our Island Home. 

Butler's Island, Georgia. 

Dear E , I feel anxious to tell you, as 

you no doubt also will be ready to learn, 
something concerning our island home in 
the South. Here we are then, safely settled 
down on a rice plantation in Georgia, about 
4,000 miles away from our friends on your 
side of the water, and yet hearing every day 
the same language spoken, although it must 
be confessed in a very peculiar and hardly in- 
telligible manner, by our sable brethren (I 
believe ' brethren ' is the proper term in these 
free and enlightened days). 

R 



/ 



242 Appendix, 

I am monarch of all I survey, which is an 
island of about t,6oo acres, surrounded by a 
muddy-looking river, called by the romantic- 
sounding Indian name of the Altamaha. 
How far prettier these Indian names are 
than our Anglo-Saxon. Take for instance, 
Chicago, Indiana, Ogeechee, Cincinnati, 
Omaha, &c. ; and what a pity they did not in 
every case retain the old names, and call New 
York Manhattan, which it really is. 

Our castle is a neat but not gaudy little 
frame house, with a piazza in front of it, from 
which you descend by six steps into a garden, 
or rather small grove of orange trees, pal- 
mettoes, oleanders, and roses. The first- 
named are laden with golden fruit, of a 
quality unsurpassed anywhere in the world, 
I am bold to say, for size and sweet- 
ness. We are hard at work now packing 
them up for market, and shall have over 100 
barrels for sale. The interior of the man- 
sion is in accordance with its modest exte- 
rior ; a small dining-room, a small drawing- 



Appendix. 



243 



room, a very small office or study, a small 
hall, a pantry, and two comfortable bed- 
rooms on the ground-floor, and two more 
comfortable bedrooms over the dining and 
drawing-rooms. At the rear of the house 
about twelve yards, is what is called the 
colony, where are situated the kitchen, ser- 
vants' sitting-room and bedrooms, the laundry 
and dairy, and in a corner of the yard is a 
turkey-house, full of prime Christmas fowl. 
Behind the colony is Settlement No. 1, 
where the coloured people (I believe this 
also is the correct term) reside. It consists 
of an avenue of orange trees, on each side of 
which are rows of wooden houses, and at the 
end of which, facing the avenue, is what 
was the old hospital, but which is now half 
of it the church and the other half the resi- 
dence of our English labourers, eight in 
number. Immediately in front of our 
garden is the Altamaha river, with the land- 
ing-place for the boats, and from which all 

the water-supply is drawn. On the left of us 

r 2 



244 



Appendix, 



is the overseer's house, a larger and more 
imposing edifice, although not so comfortable 
as ours. On the right are the barns and the 
new threshing mill and engine, which are very 
nearly finished, and present a magnificent 
appearance from the river. The old mill, 
with all the valuable machinery, was burnt 
down a year ago. The rest of the Island con- 
sists of rice-fields, of which about 1,000 acres 
are under cultivation or cultivable, some 
marsh land covered with thick bamboo and 
reeds, in which the wild duck do congregate, 
and some scrubby brushwood ; also Settle- 
ments Nos. 2 and 3, an old, rickety, but very 
large barn, a ruined mill, a ruined sugar-house. 
Of the rice plantation and method of culti- 
vating it, I shall hope to write at some future 
time when I know more about it. I shall 
also reserve my account of the liberated 
negro until I know more of him. I fear, 
however, that further acquaintance with that 
much-abused, and at the same time much 
over- rated specimen of humanity, will not 



Appendix. 



245 



tend to raise him much in my estimation. 
At present I have plenty to tell you about. 

And first I must say something about 
our Church Services. Last Sunday we met, 
at 1 1 a.m., in the room which has for some 
years been used as the Chapel for the 
negroes, but which is small and not orna- 
mented. I have in my eye a very good- 
sized room at the overseer's house, which I 
think I can make into quite a nice little 
Chapel. However, for the present we have 
to do with the little chamber at the old hos- 
pital, and here, on Sunday, I read through 
the service, and spoke to them on the sub- 
ject of the Gospel for the day, viz., the 
miraculous feeding of the multitude with the 
loaves and fishes. I try and speak to them 
in as simple language as I can, as I fear they 
(the negroes) are very ignorant, although 
they have a minister of their own, and ser- 
vices twice a week. Concerning their reli- 
gion and services I shall tell you more when 
I write to you on the subject of the negro, 



246 



Appendix. 



I found them very attentive, and we sang the 
Old Hundredth and another hymn out of the 
American Hymnal, which had been taught 
them. Sunday afternoon, at three p.m., I had 
school for the children, but which was also at- 
tended by quite old people. We commenced 
by singing, then I said a few prayers, next I 
heard the children the Catechism and ex- 
plained it to them, and after closing with 
hymns and prayers, we commenced practising 
chants and hymns. They are very quick at 
learning tunes, and I think in time we shall 
get a fair choir. Fancy a choir of small 
frizzle-headed little niggers in white sur- 
plices ! We shall have to have a regular 
little church built first before we get to that. 
They have their own service in the evening. 

I intend, as soon as we are quite settled 
down, to start a night school for them twice a 
week. Now I must tell you about a wedding 
which I performed last Saturday. The 
bridegroom was a grandfather, the % bride a 
grandmother, both very respectable people. 



Appendix, 



247 



The hour appointed was nine in the evening. 
(It is quite the custom to be married in the 
evening all through the United States.) The 
little Chapel was crowded by a well-behaved 
congregation of blackies. The bride, although 
having reached years of discretion and 
having gone through the ceremony before, 
was as bashful and coy as blushing seventeen. 
She was literally supported by her bridesmaid 
(a lady of about the same age), who clutched 
her hard by the arm as if she was afraid she 
might escape. The bride's dress was simple 
and neat — a white apron over a stuff gown, 
and a white turban on, and white cotton gloves 
on her hands, one of which held a white hand- 
kerchief, folded in the form of a fan or dinner 
napkin in front of her face, to hide, I suppose, 
her blushes, if indeed she could have shown 
them on her jet-black face. The groom was 
dressed in a sober suit of black with a blue 
kerchief. When I put the all-important 
question, 1 Chatham, wilt thou have this 
woman to thy wedded wife ? ' &c, the answer 



248 



Appendix. 



was promptly given, * I will, massa, I will : ' 
and when I asked 4 Who giveth this woman 
to be married to this man ? ' the father of the 
Island, old Angus, spoke out boldly, ' I do, 
massa, with all my heart.' The behaviour of 
all, however, was reverent throughout, more 
so than on another occasion, three or four 
years ago, when the old black preacher came 
over from another island to marry a couple, 
and was requested by their mistress to use 
the Prayer Book Service, which (although he 
was able to read) he did not understand. 
Consequently, he would read through all the 
Rubrics, and was going on through the 
Service for Visitation of the Sick, when he 
was judiciously stopped. J. W. L. 



Appendix, 



249 



No. 2. 

Our Harvest Home. 

Dear E , — The 28th of November, 

1873, will be likely to be long remembered by 
the inhabitants of Butler's Island, Georgia. 
Thursday, the 27th, was the day appointed 
by the President as the annual Thanksgiving 
Day, to be observed throughout the States ; 
and here let me observe by the way, that it 
would be well if our civil and ecclesiastical 
authorities in England would follow the 
example of America in this, and have one 
special day set apart for thanksgiving to the 
Almighty for the ingathering of the fruits 
of the earth. In the American Prayer Book 
there is moreover a Form of Prayer and 
Thanksgiving, to be used yearly on this 
occasion. Well, as I have said, the 27th 
was the day appointed, and we had made 
every preparation for the due observance of 

S 



250 



Appendix. 



that day, but the elements were unpropitious. 
The rain fell in torrents, and when it does rain 
here, which is not often, it comes down in real 
earnest, and so we were forced to put off our 
festival to the 28th, and were well rewarded 
by doing so, as the sun once more shone 
brightly, and the wind, which had been so 
boisterous, sobered down, and the air was 
fresh and balmy. At twelve o'clock we 
assembled in the small room which does 
duty for our church, which was decorated 
with illuminated texts and branches of 
palmetto, red cedar, and other evergreens, 
while from the centre of the room was 
suspended a big orange branch, laden with 
the ripe fruit. The room was as full as it 
could hold of negroes, amongst whom here 
and there were a few white faces, the English- 
men we had brought with us, and the old 
doctor from the neighbouring town, being 
among the latter. The hymns selected were 
the Old Hundredth, and the Harvest Hymn, 
No. 224, from Hymns Ancient and Modern, 



Appendix. 251 

which were heartily sung by our youthful 
black choir, all the people joining in the last 
two lines of the hymn — 

For his mercies still endure, 
Ever faithful, ever sure. 

At the close of the service I delivered a 
short address on the object of our gathering, 
and the necessity of preparing ourselves for 
the great harvest at the end of the world, 
Deut. viii. 10, 11. Service ended, we marched 
in procession to the new barn, a youthful 
black leading the van with a banner (which I 
had brought with me from England), on 
which were inscribed the words, ' The Lord 
of the Harvest.' Behind the banner-bearer 
I walked, and then the three black captains 
or foremen of the gangs. After which, the 
men two and two ; and then the women, 
dressed in Sunday best, and with picturesque 
turbans on their heads. 

The barn which was to be the banquet- 
ing hall for the occasion is a large building 
which has only just been completed, and 

s 2 



252 



Appendix. 



which consists of two storeys, each 60 feet 
long by 25 broad. The feast was to take 
place in the upper storey, and here great 
preparations had been made in the way of 
decorations. The walls were draped round 
with old curtains, on which were texts and 
mottoes. On one side, in large letters formed 
of orange leaves, was ' Praise ye the Lord of 
the Harvest/ on the other side, ' Welcome 
to our Home,' and ' The Lord bless our 
Home.' Along the base of the wall was the 
fringe formed of the graceful fan-like palmetto, 
whilst stars formed of the same plant were 
fixed on each side of the texts. The cedar, 
the cypress, the orange, the hickory, and 
other evergreens were also brought into 
requisition, whilst suspended from the topmost 
beams of the hall were the Union Jack of 
Old England, and the Stars and Stripes of 
America, below which hung large bunches of 
oranges and ears of rice, representing the 
produce of the Island. About one hundred 
coloured people sat down to a substantial 



Appendix. 253 

repast, consisting of stewed oysters, sweet 
potatoes, rice, rounds of beef, ham, bacon, 
hominy, oranges, and coffee, and it is need- 
less to say that they did ample justice to the 
good things that were set before them. There 
were no toasts after dinner, as the fashion 
of toast-giving has not yet reached this part 
of the world, and probably would not have 
been understood by the sable guests. Din- 
ner ended, we had, by way of sports, some 
excellent boat and canoe races along the 
broad river Altamaha, which flows at the 
foot of the barn. The wav these negroes 
manage their small vessels is remarkable. 
The canoes are cut out of a single log of 
cypress, and each nigger 'paddles his own 
canoe ' with great dexterity, using his paddle 
first on one side then on the other. The 
spectators were greatly excited, and ' Quash 
wins ' was heard on all sides, as the young, 
good-looking, dark-skinned carpenter shot 
past, showing his pearly teeth under his black 
moustache. The regatta ended, it was nearly 



254 



Appendix. 



dark, but the young people requested that 
they might shout for the new barn. This 
was not done, as you might be led to suppose, 
by loud hurrahs — much more systematic than 
that. The girls and boys assembled in the 
upper storey where we had feasted, and, hav- 
ing formed in a circle, commenced dancing or 
rather shuffling round (as they do not lift the 
heel), each one following close behind the 
other, and all singing as they danced a sort 
of dirge or hymn. As they continued they 
got louder in their song and more shuffling 
in their gait. It was curious, but not elegant. 
I cannot help thinking it is a remnant of 
their old country, as I have seen in Egypt a 
very similar performance, only rather more 
heathenish. Having finished their shouting, 
they returned peacefully to their homes, and 
so ended the first Harvest Festival celebrated 
on Butler's Island. J. W. L. 



Appendix. 



255 



No. 3. 

Christmas Shopping down South. 

Dear E — Christmas shopping down 

South is a very different matter from shop- 
ping at the fashionable Spa within two 
miles of your house, and finding there every- 
thing necessary for your Christmas wants. 
Savannah is our Leamington, and is about 
100 miles distant. Now, if we had the ex- 
press trains of the Great Western Railway or 
London and North Western Railway close 
by, we might, at slight risk in these days to 
our necks, do it comfortably in three hours' 
time. As it is, however, the time occupied 
in getting to our shopping town is about 
eighteen hours, either by land or water, pro- 
vided, that is, that the steamboats do not get 
stranded on a sandbank, or the trains do not 
break down in a swamp. Having several 
purchases to make in the way of knicknacks 



256 



Appendix. 



for our Christmas tree, green vegetables for 
our Christmas dinner, mules for our ploughs ; 
and, moreover, having to see after all our 
goods, which had just arrived at Savannah 
by the steamer ' Darien,' after being three 
months on the road, it was determined that 
I should set out for the city of Savannah, and 
the account of my journey to and fro is what 
I purpose now to give you. I was fortunate 
enough to get a passage in the steamer of our 

rice factor, Major W , who had come down 

partly on a pleasure trip and partly to get a 
load of rice, and who had on board with him 
the Bishop of the Diocese, a colonel, a naval 
captain, and a planter, all of whom, together 
with your humble servant, slept in a row 
on the floor of the saloon or cabin, which 
measured about 1 8ft. by 12ft. Well, it was 
arranged I should meet the steamer at 7 p.m. 
in the evening at Darien, and I accordingly 
rowed over there, but after waiting for two 
hours, neither seeing nor hearing anything of 
her, and supposing that she had either altered 



Appendix. 257 

her course or was high and dry on a sand- 
bank, I returned home again. I had not, 
however, been at home more than half an 
hour before I heard the whistle of the steamer 
in the distance, and immediately ordered the 
boat out with two fresh rowers, and set off as 
fast as we could go for Darien. Here I found 
her taking in fuel, and received a hearty 
welcome from all on board. After two hours' 
delay at Darien, we started about the middle 
of the night up the winding course of the 
river, and through the treacherous Romiley 
Marsh, where you can, in places, touch both 
shores of the land with a long pole. We 
arrived at Savannah without any mishap after 
twenty-four hours' journey, not reckoning the 
time I had to wait at Darien. 

At Savannah I was hospitably enter- 
tained by my friend Mr. L., whose house I 
well remembered, from having received great 
hospitality there four years ago ; the beauti- 
ful garden of camelias was full of bloom, just 
as it was when I last visited it. Having 



258 



Appendix. 



accomplished my commissions, bought mules 
and ploughs, and had a long interview with 
the very troublesome Custom-house officers, 
and having, moreover, recovered my dear 
old retriever ' Toby/ who had been a pas- 
senger on board the steamer 1 Darien,' and 
had made great friends with all the officers 
and crew, I thought I would try going home 
by rail, so I started at four p.m. on Tuesday 
for the station, or depot (as it is called in 
this country), of the Atlantic Gulf R. R. 
Here I took a ticket for Jessup, a junction 
on the road, where I had to change on to 
the Brunswick and Albany R. R. 5 and took 
ticket for No. i, which I reached at ten p.m. 
I was assured by a gentleman on board the 
cars (whom afterwards I found to be an inte- 
rested party) that I should find excellent 
accommodation at No. i ; but No* i proved 
not to be quite Ai. It was situated in the 
middle of the pine forest, which stretches 
away inland for thousands of miles. * A few 
wooden shanties belonging to the negroes 



Appendix. 



259 



showed that it was inhabited. To one of 
these shanties we, i.e., three fellow-passengers 
(who had been beguiled into stopping there 
by our accommodating friend) and self, were 
guided by a small darkey with a lantern. 
We found the wooden erection was a store, 
where rice, potatoes, corn, calico, and 
whisky were dealt out to the negroes who 
inhabited those parts. The store was full of 
these gentry making their purchases, and 
enjoying themselves with dancing and sing- 
ing to the tune of a fiddle. A large log fire 
burnt at one end of the store, and round 
this we gathered, waiting to be shown to our 
apartments for the night. After about an 
hour had elapsed, a boy came with a light to 
show us the way ; he first led us outside the 
house, and then up a ladder which seemed 
to lead to a hayloft, but which really led to two 
roughly boarded rooms, not any better than 
lofts, which were supplied with beds, and not 
a single other article of furniture, the washing 
apparatus (which consisted of one small tin 



26o 



Appendix. 



basin) being placed in the passage between 
the two rooms. Being an old traveller and 
well acquainted with the customs of the 
country, I immediately took possession of 
the smallest room, and took my dog ' Toby ' 
in with me, thus effectually guarding against 
any other companion in my room. The 
other chamber, which was a large one with 
two beds, I left to my three fellow-travellers. 
This may have appeared selfish ; but chacim 
pour sot is my motto when travelling in 
unknown regions and with unknown friends. 
I found the bed comfortable, although the 
room was roughly put together, the lights 
from the store below shining through the 
chinks of the floor, and the sounds of music 
and revelry being very distinct. As I was 
pretty well tired by my journey, however, 
I soon went fast asleep, regardless of the 
music below me or the letting off of fireworks 
outside ; and at six o'clock next morning was 
up and got the first wash in the tin basin, after 
which I knocked at my fellow-travellers' door 



Appendix. 



261 



and awakened them. After a substantial 
breakfast of wild venison and eggs and 
bacon, we set off in a two-horse vehicle 
through the pine forest, to a place called 
Hammersmith landing,- about seven miles 
distant, where we found a very small steamer 
about the size of a fishing punt, waiting to 
convey passengers to Darien, eight miles off. 
As it had to pass the head of our Island, I 
persuaded the captain and crew (who were 
one and the same person), to land me at a 
convenient spot, and after a walk of two 
miles across the Island, I reached my house 
at 1 1 a.m., having accomplished the return 
journey in nineteen hours. I may add that 
the results of my shopping were satisfactory, 
and that the Christmas tree exhibited in the 
new barn gave great delight to old and 
young among the coloured inhabitants of 
Butler's Island. 



262 



Appendix. 



No. 4. 
Rice-cultivation. 

Dear E , — You would perhaps like to 

know something about the cultivation of that 
most useful of grains which forms the chief 
staple of food for a vast number of people in 
India and China, and through lack of which, 
alas ! so many of our fellow-subjects in the 
Indian Empire are suffering so terribly. I 
will therefore endeavour in this letter to give 
you some idea of the way we cultivate rice 
on Butler's Island. A plantation is not our 
idea of a plantation in England, i.e. a pleasant 
grove of trees : and a rice plantation is cer- 
tainly not a particularly attractive-looking 
place to the casual visitor, as the best land 
for the purpose is the flattest, in order that 
a plentiful supply of water may be flowed 
upon it at different seasons of the year. It 
consists for the most part of land redeemed 



Appendix. 



263 



from the pine marshes, and a great deal of 
trouble it must have cost those bold pio- 
neers of civilisation who originally undertook 
the task. Forests had to be cut down, 
marshes drained, and a high embankment 
thrown up round the whole plantation, before 
anything could be done. Like the inhabi- 
tants of Holland, we depend upon our dykes 
for our livelihood, and the chief expense in 
connection with such property is keeping up 
the banks and clearing the canals and drains 
every year ; if this were neglected for two or 
three years, the plantation would relapse into 
its original uncivilised state, and become 
once more a desolate marsh, fit only for wild 
duck, snipe, frogs, water snakes, and mud 
turtle to live in. Hence the reason that, since 
the war, owing to want of capital and labour, 
much of the country in the Southern States 
has returned to its normal condition, and 
that whereas formerly, in six of the Southern 
States, 186,000,000 bushels of rice were sent 
to market, in 1870 only 72,000,000 were 



264 



Appendix. 



raised. The original planters having been 
completely ruined by the war, the planting in 
many cases has been carried on by negroes 
on their own account in small patches. As 
the Agricultural Commissioner, in his report, 
has lately stated — ' The rice-planters were 
driven from the Carolina and Georgia shores 
during the war, labour was in a disorganised 
and chaotic state, production had almost 
ceased, and at its close, dams, flood-gates, 
canals, mills, and houses were either dilapi- 
dated or destroyed, and the power to compel 
the labourers to go into the rice-swamps 
utterly broken. The labourers had scattered, 
gone into other businesses, and those obtain- 
able would only work for themselves on a share 
contract. Many of the proprietors were dead, 
and more absentees, and inexperienced men 
from the North or elsewhere assumed their 
places. The rice-fields had grown up in weeds 
or tangled shrubbery, the labour of separation 
was discouraging, and the work of cultivation 
greatly increased, giving unexpected gravity 



Appendix. 



265 



to the accidents and contingencies of the 
season.' 

This picture is by no means overdrawn, 
and even now, in our own neighbourhood, 
there is scarcely a planter whose plantation is 
not mortgaged, and whose crop is not the 
property of his factor who has advanced him 
money to plant with. They plant on suffer- 
ance, and live from hand to mouth as best 
they can. And now, to return to the subject 
of planting, operations may be said to com- 
mence towards the end of the fall, after the 
first frost, i.e. about November. The fields 
are first burnt off, that is to say, the dry 
grass, rice stubble, and reeds are in this man- 
ner cleared off ; the ploughs are then put in, 
and the ditches and drains are cleaned out 
and the banks made up. The work of ditch- 
cleaning and banking is now generally done 
by gangs of Irishmen, who come down from 
the North each winter, and do the- work 
admirably. 

I ought, perhaps, to explain more fully 

T 



266 



Appendix. 



the configuration of a rice plantation. Round 
the whole of it, as I have said, a high bank is 
thrown up, to protect it from high tides and 
freshets or floods ; the land within this em- 
bankment is divided off into fields by check- 
banks and face ditches, and each field, which 
is about twenty acres in size, is subdivided 
by smaller ditches, called quarter drains. 
Through the length and breadth of the plan- 
tation generally run two or three canals, 
which serve to drain the Island, and also to 
convey the flats, or large flat-bottomed boats 
for harvesting the rice. Well, the land having 
been burnt off, ploughed, and ditched, the 
harrows are put on in early spring, and the 
seed is planted in time, if possible, for the 
first high tides in March. As soon as the 
seed is sown, the water is let on to the fields, 
and kept on eight or ten days to sprout the 
rice ; this is called the first flow. About three 
weeks afterwards the second flow is put on, 
and kept on from ten to thirty days, and upon 
the length of this second flow there is a great 



Appendix, 



267 



diversity of opinion amongst the planters, 
some being for keeping it on as long as thirty 
days, in order to kill the grass and weeds, 
and others not keeping it on half that time, 
for fear of weakening the rice. The third or 
harvest flow is put on about the; end of June, 
and kept on until the middle of August, when 
the crop is ready for harvesting : and this is 
work which can only be done by negroes, as 
owing to the swampy state of the fields and 
the great heat of the sun, the malarious at- 
mosphere makes it dangerous for any white 
man to stay a single night on the plantation. 
The crop being harvested, nothing remains 
but to thresh it and send it to market. The 
threshing is done by a steam thresher, in much 
the same way as grain is threshed in England. 
It is generally, however, sent to the factor in 
rough, i.e. with the husk on, and is pounded in 
large mills at Savannah or Charleston, and is 
then ready for sale. The great enemies of 
the rice-planter are volunteer and freshets ; the 
first of these is the scattered seed of the rice, 



268 



Appendix. 



which becomes a very disagreeable weed, 
and is very difficult to eradicate ; the second 
the floods, which come down from the 
hilly country in spring and autumn, and 
put the plantations under water, and the 
planters to much inconvenience. We have 
just had one of these visitors — fortunately, 
not a very serious one ; still it has prevented 
our doing any work for about a fortnight, 
and made some of the fields look like a vast 
lake. 

With regard to our own labour on the 
plantation, we had at the beginning of the 
year seven Irishmen for ditching and bank- 
ing, at two dollars per day ; an English car- 
penter and blacksmith, at two and a half 
each ; six English labourers, at one and a 
half each ; two coloured carpenters, at one 
and a half ; and about eighty negroes, full 
hands, three-quarter hands, half hands, and 
quarter hands, rating at twenty-four, eighteen, 
twelve, nine, and six dollars per month ; 
added to which we have a trunk-minder (to 



Appendix. 



269 



look after the trunks or locks which shut out 
the water from the ditches), a cow and sheep- 
minder, an ostler, a flatman, and a boatman. 
This seems to be a large staff for the cultiva- 
tion of 500 acres ; but we do not find it 
enough, as most of the negro hands are 
women and children, and the men do as little 
work as they can. We have fifteen mules 
for ploughing, harrowing, and drilling, and 
our wagons are large flats or punts with 
which the harvest is got in, whilst boats of 
various sizes do duty for light carts and 
carriages. 

We have just leased a neighbouring 
island to an energetic young planter, who 
has brought down thirty Chinamen to work 
it. It remains to be seen whether they will 
do the work better than the negroes — they 
could not do it much worse. Our two small 
islands now represent the four quarters of 
the globe, as we have inhabitants on them 
from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America ; 
and as for different sects, there are the fol- 



2/0 



Appendix, 



lowers of Confucius and of John Wesley, 
besides Roman Catholics, English Episco- 
palians, American Episcopalians, Baptists, 
and I know not what besides. The Es- 
tablished Church on the Island is Anglo- 
American Episcopalian, and there are no 
church rates. Last Sunday I had an excellent 
congregation in our new little church, some 
of the neighbours from the other plantations 
coming over to attend service. We expect 
a visit from Bishop Beckwith, our Diocesan, 
shortly. 

The reason why the middle or sprout 
flow used to be about ten davs and is now 
often thirty days, is because labour was 
plentiful, and all the grass or weeds could be 
picked out by hand. Now, owing to want of 
hands, water is kept on a long time in order 
to kill the grass, and so save trouble of 
picking. It is thought, however, by many, 
that the rice is weakened by being kept so 
long under water. In old times four to 
five acres was planted to the hand ; now, 



Appendix. 



271 



ten acres and more are planted, so that 
we have only half the number of hands to 
plant the same quantity. Machinery has 
been introduced since the war, to take 
the place of hand-labour, so we have drills, 
horse-hoes, and carts as substitutes for 
hand-sowing, picking, and toating, i.e. carry- 
ing in baskets on the head. Much more 
might be done by machinery, but capital is 
wanted in the South to invest in it. Two 
and a half bushels of rice are planted to 
the acre, yielding thirty to fifty bushels per 
acre. 

P.S. — We have just heard that a great 
* freshet ' is coming down from the up country 
to visit us. A telegram has been received to 
that effect ; and it takes ten to fifteen days 
for it to travel the 500 miles. Although we 
have plenty of notice, we can do nothing to 
keep out the unwelcome visitor, and next 
week the whole Island may be under water, 
and all agricultural operations brought to a 
standstill at the most important season of the 



272 Appendix. 

year. British farmers may be thankful that 
they have not ' freshets ' to overwhelm them, 
and negro labourers to vex and harass them. 

J. W. L. 



No. 5. 
St. Simon's Island. 

Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go, 

Where mild Altama murmurs to their woe, 

Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray, 

And fiercely shed intolerable day, 

Those matted woods where birds forget to sing, 

But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling, 

Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crown'd, 

Where the dark scorpion gathers death around, 

Where at each step the stranger fears to wake 

The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake. 

Deserted Village. 

Dear E , A pleasant picture this of 

our country down here : but then Goldsmith 
never visited it himself, and was rather fond 
of drawing upon his imagination. In all 
probability he got some account of the 
wild Altama(ha) from General Oglethorpe 



Appendix. 



273 



(the friend of Dr. Johnson), who resided for 
some time at Frederica, on St. Simon's 
Island, when he was Governor of Georgia. 
It is a base libel on the beautiful island, and 
would not have done much to have encour- 
aged emigration of the agricultural labourer 
of these days, under the fostering care of the 
great general. St. Simon's has witnessed 
many changes since the day when Oglethorpe 
first settled at Frederica in 1739, and called 
that wild spot after Frederick, son of George 
II. Charles Wesley accompanied him, and 
acted as his chaplain and secretary, while his 
brother, the great John, took up his abode at 
Savannah as Rector of Christ Church, the 
only incumbency he ever held. Both brothers 
were unfortunate in this first missionary en- 
terprise of theirs. The reception of John at 
Savannah was most hearty, and the enthu- 
siasm with which he began his work was great ; 
but, alas ! the enthusiasm on both sides soon 
passed away, and John Wesley found himself 
in difficulties with his people ; some say on 



274 



Appendix, 



account of an unfortunate love affair ; others, 
on account of his rigid adherence to what 
were termed his High Church views, and 
because he refused to administer the Holy 
Communion to the chief magistrate's niece. 
Whatever was the cause, he left Savannah 
after twenty-two months' residence, and thus 
ended, rather ingloriously, his mission to 
Georgia. He was succeeded in his work by 
his friend, the great Whitefield, whose labours 
there were more successful. Charles Wesley 
was not much more fortunate at Frederica : 
he found enemies there who tried, and suc- 
ceeded for a time, in setting Oglethorpe 
against his chaplain and secretary, and by 
whom he was treated with such harshness 
that he left Georgia about six months after, 
and resigned his offices. The old oak is still 
* to be seen at Frederica under which Charles 
Wesley is said to have preached the gospel. 
In justice to Oglethorpe it must be stated that 
he soon after found out that he had been 
deceived, and sent Charles Wesley a ring in 



Appendix. 



token of his friendship. There is a good 
deal that is interesting in connection with the 
Wesleys' brief residence in Georgia which I 
have not space to write about, and I have 
only alluded to them in connection with St. 
Simon's. Frederica was in these early days 
a rival of Savannah, and was fortified, and 
the residence of the Governor of Georgia. 
Now it has two or three nigger shanties and 
one white man's tumble-down house. The 
remains of the fortifications are still to be 
seen, and the situation is a pretty one, on the 
banks of the Sound. A great battle was 
fought by Oglethorpe at St. Simon's against 
the Spaniards in 1742, when the latter were 
defeated with considerable loss. The scene 
of action is marked by a place called ' Bloody 
Marsh.' In later times St. Simon's was the 
resort of many wealthy families, who had fine 
houses, beautiful grounds, and flourishing 
cotton plantations, where the famous Sea Island 
cotton was raised to perfection. Fine hard shell 
roads were made from one end of the Island 



276 



Appendix. 



to the other (a distance of about twelve miles), 
and the gentlemen used to meet at their club- 
house to play at quoits and bilHards, &c., 
or to arrange for a deer hunt or fishing 
excursion. 

Great hospitality was shown, and open 
house was kept for all comers, whilst picnics 
and regattas were constantly taking place. 
The late disastrous civil war changed all this. 
The fine houses have fallen to decay or been 
burnt down ; the grounds neglected and 
grown over with weeds ; the plantations left, 
with a few exceptions, to the negroes ; olive 
groves choked up with undergrowth ; stately 
date-palms ruthlessly burnt down by negroes 
to make room for a small patch of corn, when 
there were hundreds of acres, untilled, close 
at hand ; a few solitary white men eking out 
an existence by growing fruit trees and cab- 
bages, by planting small patches of cotton or 
corn, by hunting deer, or by selling whisky 
to the negroes. ' Sic transit gloria ' (Si) 
mondi. I made an excursion to St Simon's, 



Appendix. 



277 



in company with a gentleman whose father 
used to have a fine house and large planta- 
tion there before the war. We started in 
our plantation boat from Butler's Island at 
six a.m., and rowed down the Altamaha to 
St. Simon's, a distance of about fourteen miles. 
After crossing Altamaha Sound, we entered 
Hampton River, which is really an arm of the 
sea, separating Little St. Simon's Island from 
its larger namesake. On our way we shot 
ducks, and an alligator that was slumbering 
on the marsh. How the monster did plunge 
and whisk its scaly tail about ; but a charge 
of buckshot on the top of the rifle-bullet 
quieted him, and my companion boldly pulled 
him into the boat by the tail, where he lay 
quietly enough, although, I must say, I did 
not feel quite comfortable with such a fellow 
passenger, as I thought he might possibly 
revive, and take a piece out of my calf ; but 
he had taken too many lead pills for that. 
We saw many of his comrades about, who 
were very shy of letting us come too near 



2;8 



Appendix. 



them ; we also heard the old bull-alligators 
roaring like fat bulls of Basan on every side. 

The first place we disembarked at was 
Hampton Point, where our land lay, and 
where formerly were a flourishing cotton plan- 
tation, a good plantation-house, negro houses 
built of tabby (a compost of oyster shells and 
mortar), a hospital, and other buildings con- 
nected with a well-regulated plantation. The 
residence was burnt down two years ago, the 
other houses are rapidly falling into ruin, 
and the sole occupants now of this part of 
the Island are old Uncle John and old Mum 
Peggy, a venerable couple who were faithful 
servants in the old times, and who have now 
reached the allotted term of man's existence, 
and remain as pensioners on the place. Uncle 
John has a fine face and a very pleasent 
manner, and is altogether about the best 
specimen I know of a faithful old negro, who 
has served his master well on earth, and is 
prepared to meet the great Master of all men 
hereafter. As for the place, I was "delighted 



Appendix. 



279 



with it : fine old evergreen oaks, with the 
long grey moss hanging from the branches 
like the hoary beard of some venerable patri- 
arch ; peach, wild plum, and orange trees in 
abundance, and in full blossom ; semi-tropical 
vegetation and beautiful wild flowers, espe- 
cially the yellow jessamine, which twines itself 
in matted clusters amongst the tangled and 
luxuriant vegetation ; whilst flitting about 
were many-coloured butterflies, and the beau- 
tiful red cardinal bird. The Point juts out 
between the Hampton River and a creek 
which runs up about two miles into the 
interior, and which looks like another river, 
and along both rivers is a narrow strip of 
sandy beach. What would not, I thought, 
some of the wealthy capitalists give to trans- 
port this spot to the old country, to form a 
magnificent park for some modern palatial 
mansion ; and here Uncle John and old 
Mum Peggy have it all to themselves. About 
a mile inland from the shore stands another 
of the old family houses, now nearly in ruins, 



280 



Appendix. 



which is approached on every side by dark 
avenues of fine ilex, or evergreen oaks. 

After wandering about the place for some 
time, we started in our boat for Canon's 
Point, which is a mile distant, and separated 
from Hampton by the above-mentioned 
creek, the two points forming, as it were, a 
swallow-tail to the island. At Canons 
Point stands what must once have been a 
very fine three-storeyed frame mansion, with 
a verandah running all round, and having a 
large portico on each side of it, whilst round 
it were vestiges of pretty grounds and 
gardens, which had once been tastefully 
laid out ; stately date-palms reared their 
lofty heads above the portico, and oleanders 
and other flowering shrubs were dotted about. 
My companion, I then discovered for the 
first time, had not been to his old home for 
sixteen years. What a change it must have 
seemed to him from the days when that 
home was the scene of unbounded hospi- 
tality, and full of merry children. There, 



Appendix. 



281 



amongst the tall grass and weeds, he could 
still make out the little garden which was 
the children's own, and from which he was 
able to dig up some roses and bulbs to carry 
away as a memento. There, on the old oak 
near the house, used to hang the swing on 
which the young ones were wont to amuse 
themselves ; and there actually was the old 
negro woman, who used to be a faithful 
servant in the family, ' old Rina,' and was 
not she delighted to see ' Massa James ' once 
more ; and would not she do everything 
to make us comfortable in the old deserted 
house, although it had not a scrap of furni- 
ture in it ; and did she not send ' heaps of 
howd-y ' to all the members of his family ? 

Leaving my friend to recall bygone 
days amidst the scenes of his childhood, 
I attached myself to old Rina, and went off 
with her to the kitchen to see about dinner. 
She did not much like my interfering with 
the culinary department ; but one dish I was 
determined to superintend myself, and it was 

U 



282 



Appendix. 



to be a ' surprise agreable ' for my companion. 
Our bill of fare (I cannot give it all in 
French) was ' Scotch broth,' cold beef, duck, 
potatoes, hominy, rice, and last, but not 
least, my dish, which I shall call ' filet de 
queue de Falligator a la Altamaha/ and 
very good I assure you it was. I had heard 
that the tail of the alligator was considered a 
delicacy, but had never met with anyone 
who had actually tasted it, so I determined 
to judge for myself. I cut a small piece off 
and cooked it in butter, with plenty of pepper 
and salt. I will venture to say that if it had 
been served up in a Paris restaurant, with 
spinach sauce, epicures would have taken it 
for ' filet de veau aux epinards.' The meat 
was whiter than veal, and quite tender. Al- 
together we made an excellent repast, and 
afterwards slept soundly on the hard boards 
of the chief apartment. Next morning we 
were up early, and after a good meal of 
hominy and poached eggs, started off, in a 
mule cart belonging to one of the" negroes, to 



Appendix. 283 

the other end of the Island, about twelve 
miles distant. The road, which was an old 
shell one, was tolerably good (quite as good 
as most of the roads which are to be found 
anywhere down South), and lay for the most 
part through primeval woods, which formed 
an arched avenue, and protected us from 
the heat of the sun. Here and there on the 
road were cleared spaces, where the negroes 
were lazily tilling the soil in a rough sort of 
manner for their own benefit. Many of 
them left their ploughs and came to us to 
have a shake of the hands with ' Massa 
James.' At St. Clair we stopped to have a 
look at the ruins of the house once occupied 
by General Oglethorpe, and which was diffi- 
cult to find owing to the vegetation that had 
grown up all round it. We also stopped at 
a place called the Village, where stood a 
house belonging to my friend, and which was 
then occupied by two white men and their 
families, who seemed to get their chief living 
out of deer hunting. Here there were more 

u 2 



284 



Appendix. 



friends of Massa James, and more hand- 
shaking. At length we reached our destina- 
tion, a pretty place called Hamilton, situated 
on the sea-shore, with another house belong- 
ing to the family of my friend, and in which 
his elder brother lived a regular hermit's life. 
The doors and walls were covered with 
texts, and the young hermit was living 
chiefly on oysters and unleavened bread, and 
rendering the negroes aid to satisfy their 
temporal and spiritual wants. He was evi- 
dently quite a character, and I should like to 
have seen more of him, but we had to find 
our way over to Brunswick (having sent our 
own boat back), so we got three stalwart 
negroes to row us across the Sound in their 
boat, and reached Brunswick (thirteen miles' 
distance), in the evening, after having 
enjoyed our expedition to St. Simon's very 
much. J. W. L. 



Appendix. 



285 



No. 6. 

The Emancipated African. 

Dear E , — The subject I have un- 
dertaken to write to you about is by no means 
as easy a one as might at first appear. It is 
indeed easy enough for a traveller passing 
rapidly through the Southern States, or get- 
ting his opinion of the negroes as Hepworth 
Dixon did from what he saw of the waiters at 
a Richmond hotel, — it is easy enough for such 
travellers to write a lot of nonsense about 
the intelligence of the coloured man, the mix- 
ture of races, miscegination, &c. But most 
travellers see nothing of the inner life and cha- 
racter of these people, and an American might 
just as well get his opinion of a Dorsetshire 
labourer from what he saw of a waiter at the 
Langham Hotel, as a traveller in the United 



286 



Appendix. 



States form his opinion of plantation negroes 
from what he saw of Eli Brown or other in- 
telligent and civil waiters at the large hotels. 
To know and understand the negro in his 
present position, you must see and hear him 
on the floor of the State Legislature, and 
transact business with him on a plantation, 
as well as chat familiarly with him on a plea- 
sure excursion, or be waited on by him in an 
hotel. I have done all this, and therefore 
have some authority in speaking, and yet I 
can scarcely say that I know the emancipated 
African thoroughly yet. 

The fact is the poor negro has since the 
war been placed in an entirely false position, 
and is therefore not to be blamed for many 
of the absurdities he has committed, seeing 
that he has been urged on by Northern 
' carpet-baggers n and Southern ' scalaways/ 

1 Carpet-baggers are unscrupulous men who rushed 
down from the North after the war, to see what they could 
pick up for themselves from the ruins of the South. ' Scala- 
ways 5 — Southerners, who to serve their own ends professed 
allegiance to the North, and betrayed their own friends. 



Appendix. 



2S7 



who have used him as a tool to further their 
own nefarious ends. 

The great mistake committed by the 
North was giving the negroes the franchise 
so soon after their emancipation, when they 
were not the least prepared for it. In 1865 
Slavery was abolished, and no one even 
among the Southerners, I venture to say, 
would wish it back. In 1868 they were 
declared citizens of the United States, and in 
1870 they had the right of voting given them, 
and at the same time persons concerned in 
the rebellion were excluded from public trusts 
by what was called the ' iron-clad ' oath ; and 
as if this was not enough, last year the Civil 
Rights Bill was passed, by which negroes 
were to be placed on a perfect equality with 
whites, who were to be compelled to travel 
in the same cars with them, and to send 
their children to the same schools. The con- 
sequence of all this is that where there is a 
majority of negroes, as is the case in the 
States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South 



288 



Appendix. 



Carolina, these States are placed completely 
under negro rule, and scenes occur in the 
State Legislatures which baffle description. 
I recollect at the beginning of 1870 being at 
Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, and 
paying a visit to the State House there when 
a discussion was going on with respect to a 
large grant which was to be made for the 
building of the Alabama and Chattanooga 
Railway, the real object of which was to 
put money into the pockets of certain carpet- 
baggers, who, in order to gain their object 
had bribed all the negroes to vote for the 
passing of the Bill. The scene was an excit- 
ing one. Several negro members were present, 
with their legs stuck up on the desks in front 
of them, and spitting all about them in free 
and independent fashion. One gentleman 
having spoken for some time against the Bill, 
and having- reiterated his condemnation of it 
as a fraudulent speculation, a stout negro 
member for Mobile sprung up and said, 
' Mister Speaker, when yesterday 1 spoke, I 



Appendix. 289 

was not allowed to go on because you said I 
spoke twice on same subject. Now what is 
sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. 
Dis member is saying over and over again de 
same thing ; why don't you tell him to sit 
down ? for what is sauce for ' &c. To which 
the Speaker said, ' Sit down yourself, sir.' 
Another member (a carpet-bagger) jumped 
up and shook his fist in the speaking 
member's face, and told him he was a liar, 
and if he would come outside he would give 
him satisfaction. 

This is nothing, however, to what has been 
going on in South Carolina this last session. 
Poor South Carolina, formerly the proudest 
State in America, boasting of her ancient 
families, remarkable for her wealth, culture, 
and refinement, now prostrate in the dust, 
ruled over by her former slaves, an old 
aristocratic society replaced by the most 
ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw 
invested with the functions of government. 
Of the one hundred and four representatives, 



290 



Appendix. 



there are but twenty-three representatives of 
her old civilisation, and these few can only 
look on at the squabbling crowd amongst 
whom they sit as silent enforced auditors. 
Of the 101 remaining, 94 are coloured, and 7 
their white allies. The few honest amongst 
them see plundering and corruption going 
on on all sides, and can do nothing. Here is 
a specimen of the oratory of the House of 
Representatives at Columbia, the capital of 
South Carolina, where formerly such accom- 
plished orators as Calhoun, Preston, Hayne, 
&c, were wont to be heard with admiration. 

The debate was on Penitentiary Appro- 
priations. 

M inort (negro) : The appropriation is not 
a bit too large. 

Humbert (negro) : The institution ought 
to be self-sustaining. The member only 
wants a grab at the money. 

Httrley (negro) : Mr. Speaker : True — 

Humbert (to Hurley) : You shet you 

* 

myuf, sah ! (Roars of laughter.) 



Appendix. 291 

Greene (negro) : That thief from Darling- 
ton (Humbert) — 

Humbert : If I have robbed anything, I 
expect to be ku-kluxed by just such highway 
robbers as the member (Greene) from Beau- 
fort. 

Greene : If the Governor were not such a 
coward, he would have cowhided you before 
this, or got somebody else to do it. 

Hurley : If the gentleman from Beaufort 
(Greene) would allow the weapon named to 
be sliced from his cuticle, I might submit to 
the castigation. 

Such is one of the numerous scenes 
enacted in some of the State Legislatures in 
the South. The negroes have it all their 
own way, and rob and plunder as they please. 
The Governor of South Carolina lives in 
luxury, and treats his soldiers to champagne, 
while the miserable planters have to pay 
taxes amounting to half their income, and if 
they fail to pay, their property is confis- 
cated. 



292 



Appendix. 



Louisiana and Mississippi are not much 
better off. The former has an ignorant 
negro barber for its Lieutenant-Governor, and 
the latter has just selected a negro steam- 
boat porter as its United States Senator, 
rilling the place once occupied by Jefferson 
Davis. 

I might tell you much more with regard 
to those States that are now in the hands of 
the negroes, but enough has been said to 
show the terrible condition in which these 
States are now after the civil war. In a 
future letter I shall speak more fully upon 
the past and present condition of the South. 
Georgia, I am happy to say, owing to the 
prudent policy of her people and the energies 
of a population in possession of a State rich 
in resources of every kind — industrial, com- 
mercial, and mineral — has been able to shake 
off the carpet-bag and negro yoke, and is in a 
fair way to recover her independence. Still 
even in Georgia, and especially in,our imme- 
diate neighbourhood, a very bad influence 



Appendix. 



293 



has been exercised over the negroes, which 
has caused us no small difficulty in one's 
dealings with them. 

We have just heard of the death of a cer- 
tain doctor who originally came from Phila- 
delphia, and who was the means of stirring 
up an immense deal of ill-feeling amongst 
the coloured inhabitants of Darien, over 
whom he had gained considerable power, 
which he used for his own ends. I trust his 
death may be the means of making the 
people more peaceful and reconciled. From 
what has been said, it will be seen that most 
of the difficulties that have arisen between 
the negroes and their former masters have 
been owing to the pernicious influences that 
have been brought to bear on them by un- 
scrupulous and bad men. Naturally they 
are quiet and peaceful enough, and I do not 
believe that they would ever have caused any 
trouble if they had been left to themselves. 
It is only surprising v that they have behaved 
as well as they have, and that there was no 



294 



Appendix. 



insurrection amongst them during the war, 
When the war began, the Butler's Island 
negroes were all taken by one of the over- 
seers up into the interior, and immediately 
on the conclusion of the war they returned 
to the Island, although they were free to go 
where they would. 

A gentleman in the South, who went all 
through the war, told me that a negro boy of 
his accompanied him all the time, and that on 
one occasion, when he was going into battle, 
he gave him his great-coat and a sword, to 
take home to his family in case he should be 
killed. After the battle the boy made 
inquiries, and it was reported that his master 
was dead. The boy set off straight home 
with his masters things, although he had 
many liberal offers from Northern officers. 

Mr. C was not killed or wounded ; 

and after the battle got leave to go on fur- 
lough for a short time. On his way home he 
was walking through a Southern, city, when 
he saw a strange-looking figure coming 



Appendix. 



295 



towards him, which on nearing he perceived 
was his negro boy, clad in his long military 
cloak, and the sword dangling by his side, 
grinning from ear to ear with delight at the 
sight of his master. 

Many other tales have I heard of their 
faithfulness and attachment to their old 
masters which I have not time to relate. 
The fact is, they are very like children, not 
hard to manage if kindly treated, but very 
easily led astray by bad advisers. They 
were encouraged in the idea that freedom 
meant no work, twenty acres of land, a mule, 
a gun, a watch, and an umbrella ; and it was 
some time before they learnt that it would be 
necessary for them to work to support them- 
selves and to obtain the above-named 
luxuries. An old negro man named Bran, 
who used to live at St. Simons before the 
war, came the other day to see my wife at 
Brunswick. The poor old man seemed 
much broken, and burst into tears on seeing 
her. He then told us his sad tale. After 



296 



Appendix. 



the war he had bought a patch of ground 
(about twelve acres) in the pine woods, on 
the mainland. He began well, and had a 
few heifers and some fowls, but of late mis- 
fortunes had come thick upon him ; his crops, 
which would never have been very good on 
such land, had entirely failed. All his stock 
of chickens and heifers had been stolen by 
the coloured gentry in the neighbourhood. 
His son had left him to set up for himself, 
and lately his old wife, for whom he had a 
great affection, had died, and he was left 
alone in his old age with no means of 
support. At the conclusion of his pitiable 
tale, he again broke down and sobbed like a 
child. J. W. L. 



Appendix, 



297 



No. 7. 

Our Post Town. 

Dear E , It is some time now since I 

have written to you from this side of the 
Atlantic. Pray accept my apologies, and at 
the same time my good wishes for the New 
Year. As I have never told you anything 
as yet about our market and post town, I 
shall begin my letter with a short account of 
that interesting town, or rather 1 city ' as they 
call it. 

And first, do not confuse this Darien with 
the Isthmus of Darien, near Panama, in South 
America. The only thing approaching to an 
isthmus that we have is a strip of land which 
formerly joined two parts of General's Island, 
which island lies between us and the city of 
Darien. This piece of land had a canal cut 
through it long before the canal through the 
great Isthmus of Darien was ever talked 

X 



298 



Appendix. 



about, and was accomplished in this wise — so 
local tradition tells us. General Oglethorpe, 
being with his soldiers at Darien, and finding 
himself hemmed in by the Spaniards, who 
had blockaded the river Altamaha above and 
below the town, adopted a bold plan. He 
sallied forth at night, and with his soldiers 
cut through General's Island a canal about 
three-quarters of a mile in length. As their 
only tools were their swords, and the obstruc- 
tions in the shape of cypress roots were very 
great, it was a big undertaking ; but they did 
it, so we are told, and escaped to St. Simon's 
Island, and the name of that canal to this 
day bears testimony to the deed, as it is called 
' the General's Cut,' and it is through that 
cut that we have to row whenever we want 
to go to market. Whilst he was about it, 
I wish he had cut it a little deeper, as, when 
the tide is low, we get stuck in the cut and 
have to wait for high water, which is not 
pleasant, especially on a very hoot day (and 
Christmas week the thermometer stood at 



Appendix. 299 

78 ), as the muddy banks and low tide are 
not picturesque or sweet. Having struggled 
through the cut, we emerge once more into 
the broad Altamaha, and soon find ourselves 
at Darien. It is not an imposing city, I 
am free to confess. It stands on a bluff, i.e. 
the one piece of high ground between it and 
Savannah ; marshes to the right of it, marshes 
to the left of it, marshes in front of it. 
Adjoining the city of Darien is or was the 
city of Mackintosh, which, however, never 
existed except on paper. I have seen the 
plans of that city, and it is marked out with 
wide streets, fine squares, cemetery, town hall, 
&c, but it never was seen except on paper, 
and has lately been incorporated with Darien. 
The site has a fine frontage of marsh and 
reeds, and very much resembles Charles 
Dickens's ' Eden,' to which poor Martin and 
Mark Tapley were allured by the glowing 
descriptions of the Yankee speculators. I 
wish it did exist as on paper, as we own the 
greater part of it. But Darien does exist, 

x 2 



300 



Appendix, 



and has several wharves along its banks, 
where occasionally you may see the steamer 
from Savannah, or a sailing vessel from Liver- 
pool loading timber. It was once a cotton 
port, but the cotton has gone from it to Savan- 
nah ; now it is a timber port, and last year did 
a lively business. This year timber is dull, as 
the market in Europe is overstocked. The 
Georgian pine is considered the finest in the 
world, and therefore there will no doubt be a 
fresh demand before long. The chief port 
of Darien is, however, not at Darien, but ten 
miles down the river, at a place called 1 Doboy,' 
and last year there were at one time over 
sixty vessels waiting to be loaded. Our lead- 
ing men are the timber merchants, amongst 
whom are a Northerner, an Irish Canadian, 
a German, and a Scotchman. They have all 
come here to make their fortunes, and when 
they have made them mean to pack up their 
chattels and go off, as they do not find Darien 
sufficiently tempting to make it their perma- 
nent place of residence. Whilst residing here 



Appendix. 



301 



they do a good deal for the place, and not 
the least of their meritorious acts is the build- 
ing of a Protestant Episcopal Church, which 
they are about to undertake. It is to be built 
at the expense of three of them, a Presby- 
terian, Unitarian, and Methodist. This is, 
to say the least of it, liberal in every sense of 
the word, and the sort of liberality you are 
not likely to meet with in the old country. 
I referred them to our friend Mr. Robin- 
son as an architect, and they have received 
the plans and specifications from the firm of 
which he was a member at Manchester. I 
think, from what I have seen of the plans, 
that it promises to be an ornament to the 
town, and the town certainly wants ornamen- 
tation. It might be quite a pretty place if it 
only had fine buildings and well-paved streets, 
as there are several fine old evergreen oaks 
scattered about it, and the view of the river, 
notwithstanding the marshes, has a certain 
wild picturesqueness about it. At present 
the main street is a sandy road, with no 



302 



Appendix. 



attempt at paving and no idea of lighting. 
On each side the buildings are, for the 
most part, wooden shanties of various dimen- 
sions. The only two buildings having any 
pretensions at all are the hotel called the 
Magnolia House, and the Masonic Hall, and 
both these buildings are of wood. They 
have had two fires lately, which have de- 
molished about a quarter of the city, which, 
however, will be soon put up again, as it 
does not take very long to put up these 
frame houses, and it takes a very short time 
to burn them down. 

A good many Israelites have found their 
way to this remote district, and it is whispered 
that their tumble-down shanties and Cheap 
Jack goods were very heavily insured, and 
thus both fires began in their quarter ; and, 
moreover, that they were not losers by the 
transaction. Be that as it may, it is certain 
that the insurance companies have declined 
insuring any more buildings in the city of 
Darien. The shops here are unlike any you 



Appendix, 



303 



would be likely to meet with in your town, 
or any other town in England. They are 
emporiums of multitudinous articles ; and 
although the articles sold are about four times 
the price and one-fourth as good as the same 
kind of article in England, yet the variety, I 
suppose, in some measure makes up for the 
inferiority. 

The purchaser may go into one shop and 
purchase furniture for his house ; stove to 
warm it, flour, groceries, and potatoes to 
satisfy his wants ; medicines to heal all sick- 
ness, a fine dress and bonnet for his better 
half, toys for his children, ploughs, harness, 
and other requirements for the farm, and a 
drop of bad whisky for himself. The chief 
customers are the negroes, who delight in 
spending their money as soon as they get it, 
and who are not particular as to the quality or 
quantity or price of the article they wish to 
purchase, and who always choose the brightest 
of colours and gaudiest of bonnets for their 
womankind. Amongst other buildings con- 



304 



Appendix. 



sumed by the fire was the Post Office ; and 
the postmaster, a genial, accommodating, and 
very important personage, was for a time 
rather perplexed as to a temporary post-box 
for the inhabitants. He has, however, solved 
the difficulty, and now perambulates the street 
in a loose coat supplied with large pockets 
on each side. The citizens soon recognise his 
genial countenance in the distance, and come 
out with their letters, which they drop into the 
receptacles of the perambulating pillar-box. 
Talking of pillar-box reminds me of pill-box, 
and this brings me to 'our doctor.' But I 
feel that I cannot do justice to this old citizen 
in the short time that is left me, and I must 
give him a letter to himself, as he is quite a 
character, and full of anecdotes about ante- 
bellum times ; those good old days when 
' the code of honour ' was the fashion, which 
meant that a Southern gentleman was scarcely 
considered one if he was not prepared, on the 
slightest pretext, to go forth to slay his neigh- 
bour or be slain himself, in what is commonly 



Appendix. 305 

known as a duel. Our doctor has the 
queerest-looking little wooden edifice for his 
office, and the most grotesque-looking negro 
boy for an attendant, that ever practising 
physician boasted of. But, as I have already 
said, he is worthy of a description by himself, 
and he shall have it. J. W. L. 



No. 8. 

* Our Doctor.' 

Butler's Island, Darien, Ga. 

As you approach the city of Darien in a 
boat, your attention is drawn to a peculiar- 
looking erection, standing out alone on the 
edge of the bluff, and you begin to surmise 
for what purpose it may be used. It is about 
the size of a gipsy's caravan, but instead of 
being set upon wheels, it rests on one side on 
the bank, the side facing the river being sup- 
ported by two posts or stilts. There seems 
to be a door on this side, but as it is about 



306 



Appendix. 



io feet from the ground, and has no steps up 
to it, you come to the conclusion that there 
must be some other way of egress and ingress. 
From the river side it presents the appear- 
ance of a large Punch and Judy show, and 
you can almost imagine life-size marionettes 
going through a performance in the opening 
which you mistook for the door. On a nearer 
inspection, you find a board hanging below 
this opening, on which is inscribed in large 
letters, ' The Doctor.' This is our doctor's 
office, and probably you will see our doctor 
sitting in a rocking chair at the opening, 
smoking a long pipe, and scanning the last 
paper that the weekly steamer has brought 
down. On going up the bank and round to 
the other side of the wooden erection, you 
find the door, which is on a level with the 
bank, and you there discern that the opposite 
door serves as a window, there being no 
glazed windows about the establishment. 
Probably, in the doorway, you will find the 
doctor's sole attendant, a hideous-looking 



Appendix. 



307 



negro boy, marked with small-pox, and with- 
out shoes or stockings ; his position of rest 
is generally with his back against one door- 
post and his legs stuck up against the oppo- 
site one. This youth has been reared by the 
doctor from early infancy, and seems to have 
a sort of dog-like attachment to him, only he 
irritates his master not a little by insisting 
upon calling the people of his own nation 
gentlemen and ladies. ' Sare,' says the boy, 
■ dere is a gentleman outside wishes to see 
you.' 1 What sort of a gentleman is he ? ' says 
the doctor. 1 He's rather a dark- faced one,' 
says the boy, and retires with a malicious 
chuckle. The boy's duties are devoted chiefly 
to attending to a lean shaggy white pony 
which lives under the erection and between 
the stilts, and which has to draw the old doctor 
about in a rickety old buggy. On entering 
the office you receive a hearty welcome from 
the old gentleman, who bids you take the 
only other chair, and offers you the pipe of 
peace. The office is about 12 by 12, with 



308 



Appendix. 



few articles of furniture, an old stove that 
smokes as hard as its master, a deal table, a 
few shelves with empty medicine bottles and 
well-worn magazines lying thereon. The 
doctor is about three score and ten, small of 
stature, with grizzly hair and a genial coun- 
tenance, not much careworn considering the 
many troubles he has had to go through, for 
our doctor has seen better days, and delights 
to tell the patient listener about those better 
days, when the houses of all the wealthy 
planters in the neighbourhood were thrown 
open to him, and when he received a fixed 
yearly salary from them for attending to their 
negroes. Those indeed were palmy days for 
the doctor, and he could boast of fine trotting 
horses, elegant equipages, and a retinue of 
slaves. Now, owing to the Yankees, whom 
he does not love, matters are considerably 
changed ; he has hard work to find clients, 
his only horse the old grey pony, his only 
attendant the negro lad. Notwithstanding 
this let down in the world, our doctor is still 



Appendix. 



309 



cheerful, and can entertain you by the hour 
with tales of Southern life in former days, 
enough, indeed, to fill a volume ; and curious 
times they must have been by his account — 
semi-barbaric, semi-luxurious, taking one 
back a hundred years or more to the olden 
times of English society, when hard drink- 
ing and sharp duelling were the fashion. 
Our doctor has had in his medical capa- 
city to be present at many a duel, and 
many a sad tale he has to tell of the fatal 
results. He never had to act first part in 
one, although he was on one occasion very 
near it, as he thought at the time. It 
happened thus. There was in the neighbour- 
hood, a very eccentric old general who was 
a great patron of the little doctor's. The 
doctor, who passed off as a good mimic, was 
in the habit of taking off the general's 
eccentricities behind his back. This coming 
to the ears of the fire-eating general, he sent 
a note by a friend to the doctor, in which 
he demanded instant satisfaction for certain 



3io 



Appendix. 



liberties taken by him, the nature of which 
would be explained to him. The little doctor 
trembled in his shoes, for he well knew the 
fiery temper of the general ; and, moreover, 
that he could snuff out a candle with a pistol 
at twelve paces. He tried to obtain some 
explanation of the general's intentions from 
the friend, but he could extract nothing more 
from him than that the doctor should attend 
the next evening at the hotel where the 
general was staying, when he would himself 
give the explanation and demand satisfaction. 
There was nothing for it but to obey, and so 
next evening the doctor went in fear and 
trembling to see the general, whom he found 
with a few friends round him. * Sir,' said the 
general, ' I understand that you have been 
in the habit of imitating certain peculiarities 
of mine behind my back, and I sent my 
friend the Mayor to demand satisfaction of 
you for the liberty you have taken. The 
satisfaction that I require of yoy,' and here 
the little doctor felt his legs tremble under 



Appendix. 311 

him, ' is that you forthwith proceed to give 
your entertainment in my presence, omitting 
nothing.' The doctor felt immensely re- 
lieved, and proceeded at once to do as he 
was bid. On another occasion he was on a 
visit to the same general, when the latter 
proposed a ride. A couple of steeds were 
brought out of the stables, one of which was 
assigned to the doctor. The general shortly 
appeared, with a vizor on his head and a 
lance in one hand, whilst in the other hand 
he had a heavy sabre, which he presented 
to the doctor, and then, mounting his steed, 
he informed the doctor seriously that they 
would have a tournament, and that he would 
use the lance whilst the doctor should 
defend himself with the broadsword. The 
doctor was aghast ; he knew not how to use 
the sword, and yet saw that the general was 
in earnest. There sat the tall gaunt figure 
ready to charge, just like Don Quixote, 
and Sancho Panza shook in his stirrups, but 
his remonstrances were only met by, ' Not 



312 



Appendix. 



afraid, sir ; I hope not afraid.' A friend who 
was by advised the doctor to fly, and he 
took the advice, turned his steed and fled, 
whilst the knight fairly couched his steady 
spear, and fiercely ran at him with rigorous 
might. Away rode the doctor for very life, 
with the general close at his heels, and never 
slacked reins until he reached a neighbouring 
planter's, when he threw himself off and 
rushed into the house. The fleetness of his 
steed had saved him, and he could bear with 
equanimity the reproaches of this modern 
Quixote. Many other tales of our doctor 
could I tell you did time allow, but I have 
given two specimens illustrating something of 
the manners and customs of the Southern 
gentleman in the days of his prosperity. 

J. W. L. 

P.S. — I omitted to state, in my account 
of Darien, that it was originally a Scotch 
colony, and was settled in 1735 under the 
name of New Inverness. The Highlanders 
from Darien, under the command of Colonel 



Appendix. 



313 



Macintosh, rendered valuable assistance to 
General Oglethorpe in his campaign against 
the Spaniards. Colonel Macintosh was also 
in command of the Georgia Militia during 
the war of Independence, and greatly distin- 
guished himself in his encounters with the 
Britishers. The county we live in is called 
after him, and the old family house of the 
Macintoshes still exists about six miles from 
Darien. 



No. 9. 

A Trip to Florida. 

Dear E , About the middle of last 

month a looked-for freshet began to make 
its appearance at the head of our Island, and 
very gradually to flow over the rice-fields, 
until it reached our settlement and came up 
to the steps of the piazza. Higher and 
higher the water rose, and bit by bit the land 
disappeared. The cellar was cleared out of 
its contents ; the negroes in the old houses 

Y 



314 



Appendix. 



moved their goods and chattels to the new 
houses we built last year, and to the unin- 
habited overseer's house ; our mules and 
horses were put in the rice mill, our sheep 
and cows were sent off to St. Simon's 
Island, and the chickens and rabbits had 
to get up into the trees. The water had 
risen 3 ft. 6 in. in our garden round the 
house, and a boat had to be tied to our 
doorstep to enable us to get away at 
all. The general aspect was not a cheerful 
one, and so we made up our minds to go 
away for awhile, until the waters had sub- 
sided. An English friend being with us, we 
thought a trip to Florida, the Paradise of 
America (I believe Paris is the Paradise of 
Americans), would be the pleasantest. So 
on February 18 we took passage on board 
the 1 Lizzie Baker ' at Darien, and the next 
day found ourselves steaming up the St. 
John's River in Florida, and a magnificent 
river it is, the most beautiful in the Southern 
States. In some places half a 'mile wide, in 



Appendix. 



315 



others a mile, and sometimes as much as six 
miles broad. The water is of a clear brown 
peaty colour, such as you see in parts of 
Scotland and Ireland. The banks along 
both sides of it are fringed with woods of 
pine, evergreen oak, magnolia, bay, wild 
orange, palm, and many other trees, whilst 
every few miles is situated some pretty 
colony, which has sprung up within the last 
few years to accommodate the many visitors 
who flock down every winter to this semi- 
tropical climate, to avoid the bitter cold of 
a Northern winter, and who, leaving at the 
beginning of the week New York or Phila- 
delphia, with the thermometer at 20 below 
zero, find themselves at the end of the 
week transported to a Southern clime with 
Fahrenheit at 70 above o. Every year the 
number of visitors increases, and the large 
hotels, and boarding-houses, and steamers can 
scarcely accommodate the crowds. The first 
place the steamers stop at after entering the 
St. John's River is Jacksonville, a flourishing 



3i6 



Appendix. 



city, the great starting point for all travellers 
in Florida. Fifteen miles above Jackson- 
ville you come to Mandarin, where Mrs. 
Harriet Beecher Stowe resides, since the 
war, in the middle of a pretty orange grove. 
Ten miles further is Hibernia, after which 
you come to Magnolia, one of the prettiest 
spots on the St. John's River, where some 
Boston gentlemen have built very pleasant 
cottages in park-like grounds. Green Cove 
Springs lies just beyond, and here you find 
a warm sulphur spring which discharges 
3,000 gallons of water per minute, at a tem- 
perature of 78 . Continuing up the river 
you come to Tocoi, at which place you can 
take the train for St. Augustine, which lies 
about fifteen miles to the east. Passing on in 
the steamer by several pretty orange planta- 
tions, you arrive at Palatka, a thriving town, 
and from this place you are transferred to 
smaller steamers, which take you to many 
places of great interest and beauty, through a 
chain of lakes which forms the Upper St. 



Appendix. 



317 



John's River. The sportsman finds his way 
to Enterprise, and from thence to the Indian 
River, the happy hunting grounds of enthu- 
siastic hunters, in the waters of which are 
found endless variety of fish, turtles, lobsters, 
oysters, whilst in the vicinity of its shores 
are deer, wild turkey, an occasional bear, 
and many other smaller game. As, however, 
we did not get further than Palatka, it is 
chiefly of the northern part of the peninsula 
that I will tell you, reserving an account of 
the southern and less explored portion for a 
future time, if I shall be fortunate enough to 
explore it hereafter. I wish more particu- 
larly to tell you something of the ancient 
city of St. Augustine, the most ancient, the 
most interesting, and one of the most attrac- 
tive places in the whole of the United States. 
The history of St. Augustine goes back to 
the time of Ponce de Leon, who discovered 
Florida in 151 2, and since that date to the 
close of the late civil war, St. Augustine 
has been the scene of many a hard-fought 



318 



Appendix. 



battle and the stage of many a romantic 
drama. Thrilling tales and tragic episodes 
are told in connection with Florida, and this 
ancient city in particular. How the veteran 
cavalier Ponce de Leon set out in search of 
the Fountain of Youth, and expected to lind 
it in the newly discovered and beautiful land 
of flowers, and to obtain a fresh lease of 
youthful vigour and enjoyment, which would 
enable him to gain the affections of a beauti- 
ful young signora whose hand he had sought 
in vain in his own country. How after many 
years of fruitless search, wounded in body, 
sick at heart, and empty of purse, he died 
in Cuba. How he was succeeded by other 
bold Spanish cavaliers, who were constantly 
rebuffed by the brave Indians of the country. 
How Panfilo de Narvaez was hemmed in on 
every side by the Indians, and almost starved 
to death ; and how the commander was lost 
at sea in escaping, and how few of his gallant 
band ever reached their home again. 

Time would fail me to tell of Cabeca de 



Appendix. 319 

Vaca, the first discoverer of the Mississippi, 
and the gallant De Soto, who explored Florida 
and tried to reach Mexico, but struggled on 
with his disheartened followers as far as the 
banks of the Mississippi, where body and 
spirit gave way, and he passed from this world, 
second to none of his age in deeds of knightly 
prowess. Or of the bloodthirsty and bigoted 
papist Mencndez, who so barbarously and 
treacherously massacred the poor Huguenots 
at Anastasia Island, opposite St. Augustine, 
and also at Fort Caroline, on the banks of the 
St. John's ; or of the terrible vengeance that 
fell upon the Spanish colonists at the hands 
of the Frenchman, Dominic de Gorgues ; and 
how, later on, Menendez was attacked in his 
fort at St. Augustine by our Sir Francis 
Drake. Are not all these mighty deeds re- 
corded by the ancient chroniclers of Spanish 
history ? 

One tale I will relate to the credit of an 
Indian maiden. Juan Ortiz, a follower of 
Narvaez, a youth of eighteen, having been 



320 



Appendix. 



captured by the Indians, was taken before a 
savage chief who was bitterly hostile to the 
Spaniards, and who at once ordered Ortiz to 
be stretched out upon a sort of wooden grid- 
iron, and to be broiled alive. The cruel chief, 
Hirihigua, had a beautiful daughter about the 
same age as Ortiz, who seeing the dreadful 
fate to which the young Spaniard was doomed, 
threw herself at her father's feet and implored 
him to spare the life of the captive youth, urging 
upon him that this smooth-cheeked boy could 
do him no injury, and that it was more noble 
for a brave and great warrior like himself to 
keep the youth a captive. Her intercession 
was successful, and the young Spaniard was 
loosed, and his wounds cared for by the gentle 
hands of her who had saved his life. But 
some months later, his life being again in peril, 
his fair deliverer again came to his rescue, and 
at the dead of night conducted him out of 
the camp, and put him on the way to reach a 
friendly chief, Mucoso, who received him well, 
and protected him for many years from the 



Appendix. 321 

rage of Hirihigua. What adds to the romance 
is that Hirihigua's daughter was affianced to 
Mucoso, and that owing to the latter's refusal 
to surrender Ortiz the alliance was broken 
off, and thus the fair Indian sacrificed her 
love to her humanity, and the brave chief 
his bride to his sense of honour. 



No. 10. 

Church Work amongst the Negroes. 

Butler's Island, Darien, Ga. 

Dear E , It is with much pleasure that 

I indite this epistle to you to tell you about 
the happy results of our work amongst the 
negroes during the last two winters. Last 
Christmas I gave notice that, as the Bishop 
of the Diocese intended to hold a Confirma- 
tion at Darien in the early spring, I should 
be glad if any of our people who felt disposed 
to join our Communion would give me their 
names, in order that I might prepare them for 



322 



Appendix. 



the Apostolic laying on of hands, and baptise 
such as had not been already baptised. 

I soon found that I had a very good class, 
many of whom seemed in earnest about the 
matter and attended regularly, and listened 
attentively to what I had to say. Owing to 
the good instruction that they had had for 
some years, I found a fair number of them 
knew the Catechism well, and seemed to 
understand the explanation of it also ; an- 
swering, indeed, with more intelligence, I 
must confess, than many agricultural young 
people who have been prepared by me in 
England. On Easter Day I gave notice that 
I was prepared to take the names of those 
who sincerely wished, of their own free will, 
to be baptised and confirmed, and the conse- 
quence was that I had fourteen names for 
baptism and twenty-two for confirmation. 
As they had all been brought up in the 
Baptist persuasion, I also gave notice that I 
was prepared, if they preferred it, to immerse 
them instead of pouring water over them, and 



Appendix. 323 

I gave them some days to think over the 
matter, having previously explained the reason 
why our Church, whilst it left the manner of 
baptising to the discretion of the minister, 
usually considered the latter method, i.e., of 
pouring on the water, sufficient for the purpose. 
After consulting amongst themselves, they all 
agreed to be baptised by pouring on of water, 
and Low Sunday was the day appointed, 
and a red-letter day it may be marked in the 
calendar of our little church, for such an event 
as this had not happened before in our neigh- 
bourhood. On Low Sunday, then, fourteen 
black youths met me in a room at the over- 
seer's house which served as a vestry, and 
from there marched two-and-two into the 
church, singing — 1 Onward, Christian soldiers, 
marching as to war.' The church was prettily 
decorated for the occasion ; the font, which 
was an extemporised one of wood and porce- 
lain, was completely covered with our beauti- 
ful hanging moss, adorned with the wild blue 
iris and sweetly-scented tea-roses. On the 



324 



Appendix. 



communion table was a cross of moss and 
orange flowers, each side of which were vases 
of iris and Cape jessamine, whilst distributed 
about were more flowers, perfuming the air 
with their sweet fragrance. The hymns sung 
w r ere — ' Soldiers of Christ, arise/ and the 
baptismal hymn, ' In token that thou shalt 
not fear.' The behaviour of the youths was 
devout and solemn throughout. After the 
second lesson I performed the baptismal 
service, and admitted fourteen young and 
promising negroes into the Church of Christ. 
At the close of the service I delivered a short 
address on the text, ' See, here is water ; what 
doth hinder me to be baptised?' (Acts viii. 
36), dwelling particularly on the fact that the 
Ethiopian baptised by Philip was the first 
individual convert to Christianity baptised 
after our Blessed Lord's ascension. I also 
reminded them how, more than five years ago, 
when I had visited the Island as a perfect 
stranger to them, I had been asked to preach 
to them, and had selected the same subject, 



Appendix. 325 

viz., Philip and the Ethiopian ; and how, 
at the conclusion of the service, one of their 
old veterans, Commodore Bob by name, who 
soon after that was called to his account, had 
come up and shaken me by the hand and 
said that he had had a vision of Philip coming 
to him, and that there would be a great 
movement upon that Island. The old mans 
prophecy had, I believed, come true, although 
he was no longer amongst us to witness it. 
This was the movement, and it rested with 
them to show whether it was destined to be a 
successful one or not. 

The following Friday, Bishop Beckwith, 
of Georgia, came to lay his hands upon them, 
accompanied by the Rev. Mr. Clute, rector of 
the parish ; and a most impressive ceremony 
it was — perhaps one of the most impressive 
that I have yet witnessed. In addition to 
the fourteen youths that I had baptised 
the previous Sunday, there were six young 
women who had been baptised in the Baptist 
church, and one old veteran, Captain Angus 



326 



Appendix. 



(our negro foreman), who was a Wesleyan. 
We all met in our vestry room, and marched 
into the church, preceded by a white banner 
with a red cross on it, borne by a bright- 
looking mulatto boy, singing as we entered 
a favourite song of the negroes, the chorus of 
which was — 

We will march through the valley with faith ; 
We will march through the valley with faith ; 

And Jesus Himself shall be our leader 
As we march through the valley with faith. 

The church was crowded, not only with 
negroes, but with many of the planters and 
their families from the other plantations. 
The singing was most creditably performed 
by our coloured choir, who sang, besides the 
chants, ' Soldiers, arise,' and ' Pilgrims of 
the night,' and for a processional, ' Onward, 
Christian soldiers.' The ceremony of laying 
on of hands was performed by the Bishop 
placing his hands on each candidate separately, 
and pronouncing the blessing in the most 
impressive manner. The address to the 

4 

candidates at the conclusion must have made 



Appendix. 327 

a deep impression on those just confirmed, as 
perhaps there is no more eloquent preacher 
or one with a finer delivery than Bishop 
Beckwith amongst the many eloquent 
Bishops in this country. His subject was 
the laying on of hands by the Apostles after 
Philip had baptised the Christian converts at 
Samaria, and from this passage of Scripture 
he showed how there were different orders 
in the ministry, and whilst some could only 
baptise, by others, like the Apostles and 
their successors the Bishops, the laying on 
of hands could alone be performed. On 
Sunday all the candidates and many of the 
old people partook of the Holy Communion, 
the number of communicants amounting to 
thirty-five. In the afternoon I went over 
to Darien to witness the Confirmation of 
some more coloured people, to the number of 
ten, and had it not been for the heavy rain I 
understand there would have been several 
more. The service took place in an old 
warehouse, but the negroes are now engaged 



328 Appendix. 

putting up an Episcopalian church for them- 
selves, on a good site close to the town 
which we have been able to let them have, 
and I have no doubt but that when it is 
finished it will be well filled every Sunday. 

The work has begun well, and there is 
every reason to look for good results. 
Hitherto the Anglican Episcopal Church 
has made but little progress amongst the 
coloured people, and they have been left for 
the most part to the mercies of illiterate and 
often worthless Baptist preachers of their 
own colour. The Roman Catholic Church 
is beginning to make strenuous efforts for the 
conversion of the negroes, and the Anglican 
Church must not be behind in her efforts. 
If she succeeds, and I believe she will, 
notwithstanding the opposition that is raised 
against her by interested black Baptists, she 
will do more to civilise the negroes and to 
make good Christians and worthy citizens 
of them, than all the Fifteenth Amendments, 
Civil Rights Bills, or Freedmeri's Bureaux 



Appendix. 



329 



that have been passed or established for his 
supposed benefit 



The negro, of course, is naturally tractable 
and docile, and is easily influenced for good 
or evil. Unprincipled men have tried to make 
use of him as a mere political tool, to in- 
crease the power of the executive party in 
the South : but I believe he is beginning to 
have his eyes opened to the real facts, and 
to find out that his best friends are the 
Southerners amongst whom he dwells, and 
who know and understand him, and who are 
ready to help him out of a difficulty. 

P.S. — There are two churches for coloured 
members of the Protestant Episcopal Com- 
munion in Savannah. St. Augustine's is the 
High Church, and St. Stephens is the Low 
Church ; for already, even amongst the 
coloured people, there are different shades of 
religion, just as there are different shades of 
colour. The High Church is served by Mr. 
Love, who is quite black, and his congrega- 
tion are almost all of the darkest hue as to 



330 



Appendix. 



complexion. His church is elaborately deco- 
rated at the east end, and bright banners 
and May flowers and candlesticks are used 
in the celebration of the service. Moreover, 
he has a capital choir of small darkies in 
cassocks and surplices, who performed Tallis's 
full choral service very creditably. Mr. Love 
himself is intelligent and well-educated, and is, 
I believe, a British subject, having- been born 
and educated in the West Indies. He seems, 
however, to preach rather over the heads of 
his congregation, and not to be satisfied with 
the simplest kind of address, most suitable to 
the capacity of his hearers. Last year he had 
fifty-five baptisms, twelve confirmations, and 
forty communicants on his list. There are 
good Sunday schools attached to this church. 
The minister of the other church is Mr. 
Atwell, and his services, as well as his church, 
are of a simpler kind. He is a mulatto, and 
his congregation are chiefly mulattoes ; he 
seems to be a simple-minded, honest sort of 
man, and anxious for the religious advance- 



Appendix. 



33i 



ment of his people. The Sunday I was there 
his wife played the organ, but the singing 
was not up to the usual standard of negro 
excellence. His baptisms last year numbered 
thirty-two, and the confirmations twelve. 
His communicants amounted to a hundred 
and twenty-one, and his Sunday scholars to 
eighty-six. He has a sewing class and 
Sunday School Library Association attached 
to his church, and has a special children's 
service once a month. The ministrations of 
both these coloured clergymen seem to be 
progressive, and it is to be hoped that in 
many cities in Georgia and throughout the 
South similar churches may be established, 
and as there are but few of them now, they 
are very much needed. 

Yours truly, 

J. W. L. 



z 2 



332 



Appendix. 



No. ii. 

Church Work amongst the Negroes. 
' An Episcopal Conveyance.' 

Butler's Island, Darien, Georgia. 

Dear E , — The Second Sunday after 

Easter was a day of Church rejoicing and 
festivity in two places in the State of Georgia. 
In Savannah the Roman Catholics had a grand 
festival on the occasion of the opening of their 
new Cathedral, which is really quite a fine build- 
ing, erected by the coppers of the Irish, and the 
contributions levied at bazaars and lotteries, 
for the most part on heretical Protestants. 
Our Bishop received a polite invitation to 
attend, although he has been of late fighting 
them in their own paper upon the subject of 
the Pope's infallibility ; but he, good man, 
was far better employed on that day, conse- 
crating my church for the negroes at Darien, 
and it is about this consecration that I would 



Appendix. 



333 



wish to write to you, humble as the cere- 
mony was in comparison with the gorgeous 
show that was going on in another part of the 
State. 

The day was most beautiful, which was 
fortunate, as our roof was not completed. 
The church was prettily adorned by the 
coloured fair, or rather dark ones, of my con- 
gregation. We assembled at a house a 
short distance off — the Bishop, the Rector of 
the parish, six of the vestrymen of the parish 
church, and myself, escorted by my choir 
from Butler's Island. We marched to the 
church, the choir singing, as a processional, 
'Onward, Christian soldiers.' At the church 
doors the Bishop was met by three black 
wardens whom I had appointed, and the 
senior warden presented him with the papers 
conveying the church in trust to him. The 
church, which is a roomy one, was crowded, 
one side of it being filled with the white 
citizens, the other side with the coloured 
citizens, whilst in the chancel was the choir, 



334 



Appendix, 



consisting of about thirty coloured singers. 
The musical portion of the service was very 
well rendered. 

At the close of the Consecration Service, 
an admirable address was delivered by the 
very eloquent Bishop, upon the subject of 
the grand old African Bishop, St. Cyprian, 
after whom the church was named, and he 
dwelt with special satisfaction on the fact of 
St. Cyprian having, in the third century, 
withstood Pope Stephen to the face. After 
the sermon the Bishop confirmed nine 
coloured females, seven of whom I had 
baptised on Easter Sunday. They were all 
dressed in white, and seemed much affected 
by the ceremony. The long services con- 
cluded with the celebration of the Holy Com- 
munion, at which there were thirty commu- 
nicants, almost all my last year's candidates 
being present. Amongst the communicants 
I was very glad to see the six white vestry- 
men of the parish church. 

The Bishop expressed himself delighted 



Appendix. 



335 



with the church, which has been entirely 
built by the negroes themselves, all the furni- 
ture for the interior being executed by them 
from designs I had furnished them with. 
The church is now consecrated, the congre- 
gation is formed ; a good deal, however, yet 
remains to be done, both as regards the 
material fabric in the way of vestry, porch, 
belfry and bell, communion service, font, &c, 
for which we want funds ; and still more yet 
remains to be done as regards the spiritual 
building up of the church — a minister of their 
own, a school of their own, &c, for which I 
fear they will have to wait some time. If 
only churchmen in the North would co-ope- 
rate with those in the South, and instead of 
quarrelling about civil rights would recognise 
the fact that there must always exist a line 
between the two races, and that a social 
intermixture can never take place and is 
not advisable, a great work might be done 
amongst these poor people. A vast mission 
field is ready in which to work, into which the 



336 



Appendix. 



plough has scarcely yet been put ; labourers 
could be found to do the work, if funds would 
be forthcoming. Churchmen in the South 
have but little money to spare, and what 
they have they require to rebuild their old 
churches, and to pay the salaries of their old 
ministers, which are low enough as it is. 
Churchmen in the North express a great 
affection for the African whom they have 
freed ; they would do well to show their 
affection for him by taking some interest in 
his spiritual welfare. Up to this time he has 
been the tool of political agitators and the 
catspaw of a party seeking power. He is 
very susceptible to good or bad influences ; 
the latter in most cases have been brought 
to bear on him, it were about time that the 
former should be tried. J The results would, I 
think, exceed the hopes of many who are 
doubtful about him. 

I have alluded above to the low salaries 
of the clergy in the South ; let me say a word 
about our excellent Bishop, and contrast 



Appendix. 337 

his lot with that of the favoured diocesans 
in our own land. He has a diocese in size 
about equal to the whole of England ; he has 
no palace or pleasant grounds ; his salary is 
nominally five thousand dollars (1,000/.) per 
annum, but the payment of this is uncertain 
and always in arrears, so much so that he is 
often hard pressed to meet the numerous calls 
upon his purse ; his travelling expenses over 
so large an area are of course heavy, but they 
are, fortunately, lightened through the libera- 
lity of the railway companies, who give him 
free passes over many of their lines. He 
has to find lodgings in all sorts of quarters, 
where there is no wealthy man's house to go 
to, and he has to travel over the roughest of 
roads, often in the roughest of conveyances. 
Here is an example which has something of 
the ludicrous in it. After evening service at 
Darien, and some tea at Butler's Island, we 
started off to catch a train which was to leave 
' No. 1,' on the Macon and Brunswick line at 
two o'clock in the morning. We left Butler's 



338 



Appendix, 



Island at 9 p.m., and after an hour and a 
half's hard rowing got to the landing in the 
pine woods at 10.30. Here I had ordered 
a vehicle to meet us to take us to the station 
about seven miles off. Arrived there, we found 
no vehicle awaiting us (it had been and gone 
away again, as we afterwards heard). There 
was nothing for it but to shoulder our bag- 
gage and walk to the nearest planter's house 
about a mile off. On reaching the house 
there was no sign of life, the planter having 
gone to his home in Brunswick for the Sun- 
day, and taken his buggy and horse with 
him. I sent one of our boatmen to the nearest 
negro settlement, nearly a mile away, and, 
after considerable delay, he brought a darky 
back with him whom I knew. After a little 
consultation he managed to get a rice cart 
without any springs to it, and an old mule, 
and having put plenty of rice straw in the 
bottom of the cart, his lordship and I started 
in this episcopal conveyance on a drive of 
over seven miles through the pine woods 



Appendix. 



339 



and over a road strewed with branches and 
logs. Of course we could only travel at a 
slow walk, and accomplished the journey in 
about two hours, arriving at the station at 2 
a.m., in time, however, to catch the train. I 
forgot to say that, besides ourselves and the 
driver, we had my dog 1 Toby/ a small negro 
I was taking North with me, and our bag- 
gage. I could not help exclaiming to the 
Bishop, ' Oh that I could only have a good 
picture of this party, that I might send it 
home to one of our great dignitaries in the 
Church, and show them how a worthy Bishop 
in this country travels through his diocese ! ' 

J. W. L. 



340 



Appendix. 



No. 12. 
A Farewell Parting. 

London : February 1877. 

Dear E , — I was down South this 

winter alone for nearly two months, winding 
up our affairs there, previous to leaving the 
country, for some time at least. Many 
pleasant reminiscences of our Southern home 
will remain imprinted on my mind, and my 
connection with the negroes will be amongst 
the pleasantest. The fact is, that with all 
their faults there is something that attracts 
one much to these Africans, and if only they 
could be left alone by the agitators from the 
North, there would be little doubt but that 
Southern whites and blacks would soon pull 
well together. You may perhaps have read 
some very excellent letters which have lately 
been appearing in the Times, from its Special 
Correspondent ; if so, you will have been able 
to form some fair idea of the real state of 



Appendix. 



34i 



affairs down there, which have been hitherto 
so much misrepresented. I see that in his 
last letter, which was dated from New Orleans, 
January 25, and which was in the Times 
of February 16, he is good enough to 
refer to a conversation he had with me at 
Charlestown on the subject of the two races 
in Georgia, and mentions a certain incident 
which I related to him to illustrate the good 
feeling which existed there between whites 
and blacks. The full particulars are these. 
Lewis Jackson, a black man, who by the way 
has acted as churchwarden of the coloured 
church at Darien, was put up by the white 
Democrats of the place to fill the position of 
Ordinary of the city, and he was opposed by 
a white man who was chiefly supported by 
the black Republicans. This would scarcely 
be believed by men in the North, who 
declare that in Georgia no negro has a 
chance of office, and that no negro votes the 
Democratic ticket unless he is intimidated 
into so doing. Another negro in Darien, 



34 2 Appendix. 

who held the office of constable, not only 
voted for the Democratic ticket, but happen- 
ing to have twins born that day, named one 
4 Tilden Centennial Guyton/ and the other 
* Hendricks Centennial Guyton,' which I do 
not suppose he could have been intimidated 
into doing. The fact is the intimidation 
is generally the other way, and negroes who 
do not hold important positions like Jackson 
and Guyton are afraid to vote for the De- 
mocrats because of their own people. The 
Northerners take it for granted that every 
negro must be Republican, because the Re- 
publicans released them from bondage ; they 
seem to forget that since the war the Re- 
publicans have really done nothing for the 
negroes, nor in any way fulfilled the many 
promises they made to them. The Freed- 
men's Bureau has only striven to set the 
freedmen against their old masters ; the 
Freedmen's Bank, after getting hold of all 

their savings, broke, and they lost all they 

* 

had put in it. The Freedmen's Mission has. 



Appendix. 343 

with all its professions, done scarcely anything 
for their spiritual welfare, and they are still 
left in the hands of ignorant, unscrupulous, 
and immoral political negro preachers, who are 
mere tools in the hands of a party. On the 
other hand they look to their old masters for 
employment, and for any little help they may 
require. Is it to be wondered at then, that 
having been cheated and defrauded in every 
way by those whom they looked upon as their 
saviours, they should begin to turn to their 
old masters, who they find after all are their 
best friends ? They are called down-trodden, 
but anyone who last month witnessed in 
Charlestown their wonderful annual proces- 
sion to celebrate Emancipation, which is so 
graphically described by the Special Corre- 
spondent of the Times, and which he and 
I witnessed together, would certainly have 
come away with the impression that the 
whites and not the blacks of Charlestown 
were the down-trodden ones. But to return 
to our own negroes, we parted from each 



344 



Appendix. 



other with many mutual regrets. On the 
last day of the old year, Sunday, I held two 
full services with them, with celebration of 
the Holy Communion, besides having a 
service and celebration for the whites at their 
church five miles the other side of Darien. 
The evening service I held at my own little 
Chapel on the Island, which was crowded, 
as several of my congregation from Darien 
came over in boats to attend ; they sang many 
of their favourite hymns, and the service was 
not over until nearly ten o'clock. After ser- 
vice, the night being a beautiful moonlight 
one, I took it into my head, as I felt rather 
excited after my day's work, to start off for 
our favourite St. Simon's Island, 15 miles off. 
So, much to the astonishment of the old 
foreman, I ordered the long-boat out, and, 
with four good rowers, we started on our 
journey. A most pleasant journey it was, 
the rowers singing their quaint songs all the 
way, whilst I lay wrapped up in the stern, 
steering. We reached St. Simon's at 12.30, 



Appendix. 345 

and so saw the New Year in. Arrived at 
the Cottage there, we soon had a blazing 
fire of pine wood, and I drew the sofa up 
in front of the burning logs, and, wrapped 
up in my blanket, was soon fast asleep, 
whilst my negroes lay round the kitchen 
fire, perfectly happy. Next morning the 
St. Simon's people came all up to the 
house to bid me God speed, after which I 
wandered alone through the solitary woods 
of this beautiful Island. The following 
Thursday I held a farewell service at the 
new church at Darien, and charged my 
hearers to do their utmost to carry on the 
work that had been thus auspiciously begun. 
After service, every member of the congre- 
gation came up to shake hands and bid me 
farewell, and I was much touched by their 
simple, affectionate, but respectful manner. 
God grant that they may have some minister 
amongst them to take a real and hearty 
interest in their spiritual welfare. I am sure 
much can be done with these poor simple, 

A A 



346 



Appendix. 



ignorant people. Whilst in New York, 
preparatory to leaving in the steamer, I 
went to see the secretary of the Episcopal 
Missionary Society for coloured people, and 
I urged on him the immediate wants of the 
congregation of St. Cyprian's church at 
Darien, and I am happy to say that I so far 
succeeded as to get a promise from him 
that the Society would send down a coloured 
minister, and pay his expenses for six 
months ; this, at all events, will enable the 
Bishop to look out for further aid. Now 
that I am in England, I intend to make 
personal appeals for fresh supplies to send 
out to Darien. I might give you some 
account of our journey home, but I am 
afraid I have already written too much. I 
will only say that we made a wonderfully 
quick trip in the White Star steamer 
' Britannic' We were to have left on the 
20th, but, owing to a fog, w T e did not leave 
New York until January 21. The first 
three days the weather was fine and calm, 



Appendix. 347 

the rest of the journey it blew a perfect gale ; 
fortunately, the wind was with us and carried 
us along. We arrived at Queenstown on 
the 29th, having accomplished the voyage 
from land to land in less than eight days, 
I saw in the papers that a steamer which 
was going from England to New York had 
taken twenty- seven days ; rather a difference. 
The 30th, the day we reached Liverpool, 
was the day of the terrific gale which did 
so much mischief all over England. It was 
the first time that I had seen a really big sea, 
and although these mountains of waves were 
awful to behold, they were nevertheless very 
grand, especially at night by moonlight, 
On the Sunday I performed Divine Service, 
and it was hard work to keep my equilibrium, 
so I am not sorry to be once more on 4 terra 
firma,' and that terra my own land, Old 
England. J, W. L, 



D 

Spo ttiswoode & Co., Printers, Ncro-strect Square, London. 



I 



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